Employee posts on personal social media: the mediation role of work–life conflict on employee engagement

Abstract

Personal social media, as a private space, seems to have become another important arena for employees to share work-related posts, and the number of employee posts on social media is proliferating. However, academic scrutiny of the impact of social media usage remains inconclusive, and little is known regarding how employee posts affect employee engagement. The present study aims to fill this crucial gap in the existing research by constructing a conceptual model to unravel how employee posts shared on different personal social media platforms (strong-tie vs. weak-tie) influence employee engagement, as well as the moderating role of post content and employees’ work–life segmentation preferences. Taking the Chinese workplace as a case, we conducted a survey of 402 participants from more than 30 organizations. The results revealed that employee posts on strong-tie social media platforms will lower employee engagement via the mediating role of work–life conflict. Moreover, these negative effects can be attenuated for sharing user-oriented posts (vs. organization-oriented posts) and employees with lower segmentation preferences, confirming the moderating role of post content and segmentation preferences. The findings contribute to the theoretical understanding of employee engagement by expanding boundary theory, and provide managerial implications for social media strategies, and organizational support.

Introduction

The increasingly important role of social media as a daily communication tool has attracted increasing attention from organizations because of its high interactivity, fast dissemination speed, and wide reach (Waters et al., 2010; Yuan et al., 2018). Social media, both internal and personal, such as Twitter, Facebook, and WeChat, have become powerful tools inside and outside the workplace to bring potential economic value for organizations (Duffy & Hund, 2015; Waters et al., 2010). Especially for personal social media sites where audiences are typically friends and family, employees possess high credibility as the organization’s spokespeople (Brooks, 2015; Korzynski et al., 2020). Consequently, organizations are strategically invading employees’ personal social media to promote the organization, improve their business activities, and connect organization with employees’ audiences (Song et al., 2019). Kruse Control (2018) has reported that 71% of organizations treat employee advocacy as a “cost-effective, scalable alternative to influencer marketing.” Thus, the fluid and interactive characteristics of personal social media may leverage opportunities for employees to share work-related posts and create benefits for the organization (Sakka & Ahammad, 2020).

While the mediatization of the workforce provides unprecedented opportunities for organizations, it also becomes an assignment for employees to share work-related posts with their audiences on personal social media, especially in the context of Chinese involution where employees compete for promotions (Dou et al., 2022). Indeed, although explicit performance assessment on personal social media is lacking, employees are still required to share employee posts under incessant involution and attract revenues for organizations using their social credit and networks (Yuan et al., 2018). As the workplace continues to invade personal social spaces with the normalization of epidemic, the boundary between personal and work spaces is blurring, and the sharing of employee posts on personal social media platforms has intruded into personal social spaces unrestrainedly and invaded employees’ private space extensively (Brooks, 2015; Zhu & Miao, 2021). Consequently, employees are trapped by a dilemma of how to meet the employee posts sharing requirement from organization, and maintain emotional connections with friends and family. This dilemma may bother employees by work-life conflict and further impact employee engagement after sharing. In this research, we attempt to answer these questions from a personal social media perspective and investigate the impact of employee posts on different personal social media on employee engagement and its underlying mechanisms.

Despite the importance of this issue, extant research on the impact of social media usage in the workforce remains inconsistent. On the positive side, employees’ social media usage can enhance employee engagement (Men et al., 2020a), work performance (Leftheriotis & Giannakos, 2014), and brand ambassadorship (Sakka & Ahammad, 2020), as well as perceived organizational transparency and employee–organization relationships (Men et al., 2020b). On the negative side, employees’ social media usage can negatively affect their job performance, job satisfaction, and turnover intention (Yuan et al., 2018). These differences may stem from whether the social media platform is private or public. However, little attention has paid on the relationship of social media platform where sharer and receivers’ tie strength is an important factor influencing the effects of social media usage. Besides, practically all Chinese online social interactions are gathered on personal social media such as WeChat and Sina Weibo, including those with family members, coworkers, friends. Hence, this type of hybridity has triggered difficulties in managing relationships and needs further investigation.

To fill the identified gap, the current study attempts to explore the impact of social media employee posts on employee engagement from a personal social media perspective while focusing on the tie strength of social media platforms and how they may do so. Given that people are connected to others on personal social media at varying levels of tie strength, sharing work posts will inherently trigger different conflict perceptions and outcomes among employees. This research seeks to understand the impact of social media employee posts that are created by organizations and subsequently shared by employees as work assignments, through examining how and what social media platforms at varying levels of tie strength influence employee engagement. Specifically, via the previously unexamined perspective of boundary theory, we investigate the impact of relationship strength attributes of social media platforms (strong-tie vs. weak-tie) on employee engagement and the mediating effect of work–life conflict. We also examine the boundary effects of the post content and employees’ work–life segmentation preferences.

This study aims to contribute to the literature in several ways. First, we shed light on the interpersonal relationships supported on social media and how the strength of ties by which employees are connected can influence their perceptions and work outcomes. Second, this study enhances and extends the understanding of boundary theory by applying work–life conflict as the mechanism of social media employee posts’ impact on employee engagement. In addition, we confirm this mechanism via the moderating role of employees’ work–life segmentation preference. Finally, we contribute to messaging in social media by introducing post content as a moderator. By examining the differences in organization-oriented versus user-oriented post content, this study further explores the boundary of the employee posts’ impact on employee engagement.

In what follows, the relevant literature on employee usage and attitudes toward social media is reviewed to develop the hypotheses and construct the model. Then, the method utilized and the results are presented and outlined. Finally, the theoretical contributions and managerial implications, as well as suggestions for future research, are discussed.

Literature review and research framework

Employees’ use of social media

The mainstream social media typically used by employees has been divided into two types—namely, personal social media and internal social media. The personal social media type is hosted by private entities, such as Facebook and WeChat, and it is a platform for users to communicate life-related topics and share self-information (Brooks, 2015; Chen et al., 2014). The internal social media type is a work-oriented platform, such as DingTalk at Alibaba or Beehive at IBM, that allows individuals to create and maintain online public or semi-public profiles and foster connections with other members of the organization (Leftheriotis & Giannakos, 2014; Men et al., 2020a). Internal social media platforms are inspired by personal social media platforms (e.g., Facebook), but they run on the host organization’s servers, protected by firewalls and with access restricted to employees (Leftheriotis & Giannakos, 2014). While internal social media platforms have clear rules and evaluation criteria for employees, personal social media platforms cannot be fully regulated, monitored, or controlled, and employee actions cannot be quantified and evaluated (Grunig, 2009). Hence, compared with internal social media, employee posts on personal social media are not transparent to the organization and cannot be quantitatively evaluated and motivated. Under this premise, we aim to explore the impact of employee posts published on personal social media on employees’ work outcomes.

Previous research has revealed the positive effect of employees’ social media usage on organizations and consumers (Arthur, 2012; Dreher, 2014; Lee et al., 2020; Saleem & Hawkins, 2021). Employees have a great knowledge of their organizations’ situation and spirit, which means that they are natural corporate advocates and brand ambassadors (Men et al., 2020b). Thus, employees’ social media activity plays a critical role in an organization’s reputation and reach, fostering valuable relationships with key target audiences, such as customers, future talent, community members, or investors (Brito, 2011). In addition, employees’ social media can be an effective tool for promoting consumers’ positive word of mouth (WOM), purchase intention, and co-creation of brand value (Chou et al., 2018; Jacobson et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2020; Song et al., 2019).

Despite the advantages of employees’ personal social media use for organizations, employees’ perceptions of social media usage in the workforce remain controversial. On the one hand, employees’ relationships with the organization and work performance will be enhanced via a higher level of perceived transparency of the organization and organizational identification by employees. On the other hand, employees’ use of social media usage brings interrole conflict to employees because it means that they must act in both the roles of worker and friend simultaneously on their social media; this will negatively affect their job performance, job satisfaction and turnover intention (Yuan et al., 2018). The reviewed literature is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1.

Summary of prior studies on employees’ social media usage

Source	Research topics	Antecedents	Outcomes	Mechanism	Primary findings
Leftheriotis and Giannakos (2014)	Social media outcome	Employees’ use of social media: For work	Work performance	Utilitarian and hedonic values	Utilitarian and hedonic values influence employees to use more social media for their work
Cervellon and Lirio (2016)	Influence factors	Employee characteristics: Brand ambassador	Sharing	Not discussed	Employees who are brand ambassadors share social media skills with more senior employees
Pitt et al. (2018)	Influence factors	Organizations’ characteristics: Organizations’ rank	Employee willingness to express positive opinions	Optimism; commonality	Employees working in higher ranked organizations are more willing to express positive opinions
Zoonen and Banghart (2018)	Influence factors	Employees’ characteristics: Boundary management preferences	Employee engagement relationship	Work communication	Employees’ boundary management preferences will affect employee engagement relationship
Yuan et al. (2018)	Social media outcome	Employees’ use of social media: Advertising	Job performance; job satisfaction; turnover intention	Interrole conflict	Coercive advertising on social media leads to interrole conflict and further affects employee job performance, job satisfaction, and turnover intention
Korzynski et al. (2020)	Influence factors	Employees’ characteristics: Employee network; engagement with company-related social media content Organizations’ characteristics: Brand strength; social media activity	Company-related posts by employee on social media	Not discussed	Employee engagement with company-related social media content, employee network, corporate brand strength, and corporate social media activity can promote employees’ company-related post sharing on social media
Lee et al. (2020)	Social media outcome	Employees’ characteristics: Employees’ social media posts have valence Social media content: Organization related vs. job related	Public’s positive WOM intentions	Public’s liking, sharing, and commenting	Employees’ social media post valence and content will affect public’s positive WOM intentions
Men et al. (2020a)	Social media outcome	Employees’ use of social media: Internal social media	Employee engagement	Perceived organizational transparency; organizational identification	Employees’ use of internal social media contributes to an enhanced perceived transparency and organizational identification and leads to employee engagement
Men et al. (2020b)	Social media outcome and influence factors	Communication strategy: Strategic information dissemination; two-way symmetrical communication	Perceived organizational transparency; employee–organization relationships	Employees’ use of internal social media	Interpersonal conflict has a U-shaped curvilinear relationship with employee agility
Sakka and Ahammad (2020)	Social media outcome and influence factors	Employee social media usage: Personal; work-related	Employee brand ambassadorship	Employee wellbeing	Employees’ social media usage affects their wellbeing and further influences employees’ brand ambassadorship
Saleem and Hawkins (2021)	Social media outcome	Social media content: Employee-created content	Consumers’ purchase intention and WOM	Brand citizenship behavior; perceptions of expertise	Employee-created content increases consumers’ purchase intention and WOM

The studies described above largely mapped out related constructs that account for employees’ social media usage and possible outcomes. Sharing work-related posts as the current mainstream usage of social media, while makes employees to become brand ambassadors, also takes advantage of the relationships between employees and their audiences on social networks. However, relatively less effort has been made to consider the employees’ relationships on social media platforms as an important influencing factor, and few studies have considered the characteristics of social media platforms and investigated the relationship between employees and audiences, such as their tie strength. Consequently, the current study aims to fill this gap by investigating the internal mechanism of the impact of employee posts on personal social media based on the characteristics of social media platforms.

Employee engagement

In prior studies, employee engagement has been a core topic in discussing employees’ work outcomes toward social media usage (Lemon, 2019). Employee engagement is defined as employees’ alignment with the values and mission of the company, as well as employees feeling empowered and bringing energy, enthusiasm, and discretionary effort to their employment, such that they serve as advocates (Ewing et al., 2019). Accordingly, employee engagement has been linked to employees’ emotional satisfaction with the job, organizational identity, organizational commitment, employee loyalty, and employee performance (Lemon, 2019; Punjaisri et al., 2009).

Previous research on employees’ engagement with social media usage has discrepancies. Some scholars have found that employees’ use of and work communications on internal social media contribute to an enhanced level of perceived transparency of the organization and organizational identification, which boosts employee engagement (Men et al., 2020a; Zoonen & Banghart, 2018). Other scholars have argued that social media use in the workforce will reduce employees’ job satisfaction, which can further reduce employee engagement (Yuan et al., 2018).

To help organizations achieve the important outcomes outlined above, academics have investigated how to best use communication strategies to engender engagement. For instance, from a strategic perspective, research has shown that two-way internal communication will encourage empowerment in terms of freely sharing ideas free and support employee engagement (Karanges et al., 2015; Lemon & Palenchar, 2018). Furthermore, open communication, effective storytelling, channels, and content targeted at employees’ needs and preferences, as well as communication geared toward establishing a sense of belonging and promoting employees’ voicing actions, have been suggested to boost employee engagement (Ewing et al., 2019; Qi, 2019; Ruck et al., 2017). However, personal social media as a new communication strategy for employees to communicate with their audience, little is known on how this communication strategy and the tie strength of the social media network affect employee engagement; this study seeks to explore this phenomenon and develop a deeper insight into it.

Tie strength

Tie strength is defined as the weight or robustness of the bond of the relationship shared in a social network or interaction (Agbo et al., 2020). Strong and weak ties are two types of ties that have been defined. Strong ties are found between people with a strong bond of trust with overlapping social circles. People with strong ties are emotionally interdependent and typically provide trust and emotional support to each other (Taylor & Ledbetter, 2017). In contrast, weak tie is based on acquaintances occurring outside the network of friends, and they serve as “bridges” connecting different social groups and facilitating information dissemination and sharing (Agbo et al., 2020). People with weak ties are comparatively less emotionally attached.

Tie strength is not only shared in terms of the communication between individuals in social networks but also differences in social media platforms. A social media platform is a projection and community of users’ social relationships, and the affordances of different social media platforms will affect the strength of relationship building. For instance, similar to Twitter, Sina Weibo are more public platforms that can be visible to every user and allow users to “follow” anyone they like without permission, which leads to a wide range of relationship interaction. Whereas Instagram and WeChat are more private, only visible to designated people, and need permission to be able to see users’ circle, which makes the contacts are basically acquaintances in real life. Accordingly, users on Twitter and Sina Weibo share lower trust, provide less emotional support and have weaker association compared with users on Instagram and WeChat, and thus, build weak-ties. Users on Instagram and WeChat have relatively strong associations and build strong-ties with each other compared with those on Twitter and Sina Weibo. Therefore, Twitter and Sina weibo belong to a “weak-tie” social media, while Instagram and WeChat belong to a “strong-tie” social media (Shu et al., 2017).

Users’ demands for social media platforms also differ in relation to tie strength. For strong-tie social media, the platform is a pure social space for personal life sharing and emotional support, whereas a weak-tie social media platform is a space for information seeking and entertainment (Wright, 2012). When employees share employee posts on social media, they are actually invading the space of private life, which is especially significant on strong-tie social media. Employee posts on strong-tie social media will bring about a higher invasion of private life. Since strong-tie social media platforms act as a more private space for users to share life information, the invasion of work will increase employees’ cognitive demands and lead to greater pressure and more negative emotions (Yuan et al., 2018), as well as lower employee engagement. Conversely, information is gathered on a weak-tie social media platform; users can search and browse all kinds of information, not just life information. Thus, employee posts on weak-tie social media will bring lower invasion of employees’ private lives and lower pressure and negative emotions, which can attenuate reduced employee engagement. Consequently, we hypothesize that employee posts on a strong-tie social media platform will reduce employee engagement compared to employee posts on a weak-tie social media platform.

• Hypothesis 1 Employee engagement is lower when employees share employee posts on strong-tie social media compared with weak-tie social media.

Work–life conflict

We propose that different social media can cause employees to suffer from work–life conflict, which also influences employee engagement. Boundary theory has defined that individuals’ roles shift between the different roles they occupy, and they demarcate boundaries and attend to their work and life domains to organize these settings and their responsibilities inside them (Kossek et al., 2012; Malaterre et al., 2013). When employees share employee posts on their personal social media platforms, they are also shifting between the roles of work and life. employee posts on social media bring a great level of work–life integration and blur the line between work and life (Fonner & Roloff, 2012). The amounts of time and space on personal social media for life domains are hard to meet because of the occupation of work needs (Zoonen et al., 2016). The strain of work-and-life demands interference will further trigger employees’ work–life conflict (Pitafi et al., 2018).

Work–life conflict is higher for strong-tie social media platforms. Since the contacts on strong-tie social media are mostly acquaintance, having stronger interaction and life-bond, which make the life duties and roles are more specific in strong-tie social media, and the boundary between the work and life domains for the strong-tie social media is clearer compared with that of the weak-tie social media (Jiang & Shen, 2013; Nelson, 1989). Therefore, the act of sharing employee posts on strong-tie social media platforms is considered a more work-related role that conflicts with the life-related goal. Whereas posting on weak-tie social media platforms is relatively flexible, and people are less sensitive to strain, work–life conflict is lower on weak-tie social media platforms.

Conflicts related to work–life balance have been found to influence a variety of attitudes and behaviors of both employee and organizational relevance. Work–life conflict predicts employees’ emotional exhaustion, depression, stress, burnout, and reduced job satisfaction (Bacharach et al., 1991; Frone et al., 1997; Lee et al., 2018), and this will further lead to absenteeism, reduced performance, lower organizational commitment, and inefficiency in terms of meeting larger organizational goals (Jiang, 2012; Kossek & Lautsch, 2012). Employee engagement, as employees’ internal feelings toward work and the organization, can also be impacted by work–life conflict. Hence, we propose that employee posts on strong-tie social media platforms will result in a higher work–life conflict and further reduce employee engagement compared with employee posts on weak-tie social media platforms:

• Hypothesis 2 Work–life conflict mediates the effect of employee posts shared on social media on employee engagement.

Post content

In terms of employees’ work-related posts on social media, prior studies have noted that employees tend to share and post about various aspects of their companies and work on their social media accounts, including their work activity (e.g., work progress or job accomplishment), information related to their customers (e.g., promotion or knowledge), and information related to their companies (e.g., organizational milestones;(Krishna & Kim, 2015; Zoonen et al., 2016). The current study focuses on two main types of employees’ employee posts—namely, user-oriented posts and organization-oriented posts. User-oriented posts include information and activities that are beneficial to users, including customers or potential customers, such as promotions and new-product science education. In contrast, organization-oriented posts are relevant to the entire organization; they include posts on organizational culture, working conditions, internal affairs, organizational achievements, and organizational changes (Zoonen et al., 2016).

Role conflict can be attenuated by the reduced strain of two role-related demands. As mentioned above, employee posts on personal social media platforms, which should be private and personal, are positively related to employees’ perceptions of work–life conflict. According to boundary theory, work–life conflict stems from the strain of demands of work roles and life roles, which can be reduced via strain reduction (Zoonen et al., 2016). In terms of life roles, individuals are supposed to share self-situation or friend-benefit information on their personal social media platforms (Yuan et al., 2018). It is common for individuals to share user-orientation information on social media, such as recruitment, promotion, and coupons. Therefore, it is life-related action of sharing user-oriented information even if it is work post, and this is common and stressless, no matter whether this is shared on strong-tie social media platforms or weak-tie social media platforms. In contrast, sharing organization-oriented information is definitely a work-related action, and can bring strain to life roles. This work-related action can arouse higher work–life conflict in strong-tie social media platforms compared with weak-tie social media platforms. Therefore, we assume the following:

Hypothesis 3 The effect of employee posts on strong-tie social media (vs. weak-tie) will have a more negative effect on employee engagement when employees share organization-oriented posts.

Work–life segmentation preference

On the foundation of boundary theory, employees vary in their preferences for segmenting or integrating aspects of work and home, and they will employ boundary tactics accordingly (Kreiner, 2006; Wepfer et al., 2018). In the work–life context, segmenters prefer to separate work from life and vice versa, whereas integrators prefer to combine work and life roles. To achieve their preferences, employees with high segmentation preference employ boundary work tactics to separate life domains, and they prefer to establish a boundary of life domains and leave work behind home. Employees with low segmentation preferences have little specific requirement for work–life segmentation (Grady & McCarthy, 2008).

Employees with higher work–life segmentation preferences, who maintain sensitive boundaries between work and life, will be more intolerant toward work–life conflict. Thus, the work–life conflict brought by employee posts on social media will have a more negative effect on employee engagement for these employees. In contrast, employees with lower work–life segmentation preferences, who are accustomed to the blurring of boundaries between life and work domains, will be more tolerant toward work–life conflict. Therefore, the work–life conflict caused by employee posts on social media will have a comparatively weaker effect on employee engagement in these employees (Fig. 1). Therefore, we assume the following:

• Hypothesis 4 Work-life conflict will have a more negative effect on employee engagement when employees are in higher work-life segmentation preferences.

Fig. 1.

Theoretical Framework

Methods

Sampling procedure

Based on reviewing the extant literature thoroughly, a self-administered survey was designed and distributed to test whether (and how) employee posts on strong-tie social media versus weak-tie social media platforms have a significant effect on employee engagement and its boundary effect. Before filling in the questionnaire, the respondents were asked about their posting experience on social media at least once to eliminate those who had not shared work-related posts.

An online survey was conducted to test the hypotheses. The survey was divided into three parts. The first part is the platform usage, respondents were asked to select the most frequent social media platform they share work-related posts and fill out the tie strength measurement of the platform. As for the Chinese workplace, WeChat and Sina Weibo are two mainstream personal social media platforms involved in the workplace that were used for the presentation of strong-tie social media platforms and weak-tie social media platforms (Wu & Wall, 2019). According to the 2020–2021 China Mobile Social Industry Report, up to 2020, the user volume of WeChat, and Sina Weibo were 1,203 million and 523 million, respectively (iiMedia, 2021). In the second and main part, the items (i.e., tie strength, work-life conflict, employee engagement, and work-life segmentation preference) which were adapted from validated instruments in the previous literature were employed. The third part elicited basic information on respondent characteristics, such as gender, age, organization, and length of time in career.

Data collection

Data were collected online from wjx, a major Chinese online crowdsourcing platform that can collect the subjects who have experienced a given phenomenon and encourage them to participate in the survey by offering small incentives (e.g., Li et al., 2020; Peng et al., 2022; Zheng & Zheng, 2014). Firstly, a pretest was conducted with three professors in the research field and thirty participants who were not involved in the formal survey to check the layout. Subsequently, the measurement items were revised in terms of feedback to increase clarity and face validity.

The formal survey was then distributed randomly and started with the instructions. We explained the survey purpose, the anonymity, and confidentiality principles, in order to eliminate the respondent concerns and minimize social desirability bias. 497 respondents answered the questionnaire, while 95 respondents were excluded for not passing attention checks, providing identical answers, or failing to complete the survey. Finally, 402 eligible questionnaires were utilized for the following analysis. The average age of respondents was 29.72 (range from 18 to 60, SD = 7.00). The sample comprised 44.28% men and 55.72% women. The average length of time in career was 7.04 (SD = 6.06). The participants were current employees from different careers in more than 30 organizations. The main industry sectors the study covered were retail trade, marketing, manufacturing, customer service, finance and insurance, accounting, professional and technical services, and construction, representing 87.81% of the sample.

The respondents were current employees from different industries in more than 30 organizations in China. There are several rationales for selecting the sampling frame: (i) habitual usage of social media by target participants; (ii) high diversity from different industries and careers can reduce the selection bias in the study; and (iii) online survey, as a structured method, can overcome the time and space constraints with limited field efforts and fewer human errors, especially in Covid-19 when the samples are hard to assess. Other scholars also apply online surveys for studies on employee topics (e.g., Korzynski et al., 2020; Men et al., 2020a, 2020b).

Common method bias

Considering the constructs were collected with the self-reporting approach and cross section under a common measurement setting, there might exist common method bias (Kumar & Kaushal, 2021; Podsakoff, 2003), we performed the pre-control and post-test measures to minimize and assess CMB accordingly.

In the pre-control, we utilized three procedures, including measure separation, response anonymity, and attention checks. Specifically, the multiple items related to the predictor variable were separated from the items of the outcome variables to accomplish proximal separation (e.g., Rialti et al., 2022). We also informed the participants in the questionnaire preamble that the survey was completely voluntary and anonymous to minimize response bias and inserted attention checks in the completion process to screen out absentminded respondents (e.g., Park et al., 2021; Qin et al., 2021).

In the post-test, we utilized Harman’s single factor test to assess CMB statistically. Harman’s single factor test is a conservative and effective alternative for assessing. The result emphasized that a single factor with 30.06% explicated the overall variance, less than the 50% threshold (Podsakoff, 2003). Therefore, it was observed that common method bias was not a concern in this study.

Measures

To ensure content validity, the multiple items were derived from standard and validated scales in the literature. Standard procedures of translation and back-translation were employed before applying the scale from English to Chinese (Brislin, 1980). We first invited professional translators to translate English into Chinese and then back into English, as well as compared the translated and native versions and adapted the semantic structure of some items in response to the research context. All items were rated on a seven-point Likert scale (from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). The measurement model (see Appendix A) showed that Cronbach’s α was above 0.7 for all constructs, reaching the recommended cutoff values.

Tie strength

A three-item scale was adopted from previous studies (Chen, 2020); the items included such statements as “I have good relationships with people in Wechat/Sina Weibo” and “I am in close contact with the people in Wechat/Sina Weibo.” Cronbach’s α was 0.76, indicating that the reliability of tie strength performed well.

Work–life conflict

A five-item scale was adopted from previous studies (Netemeyer et al., 1996), including “The demands of my work on Wechat/Sina Weibo interfere with my online social life” and “The amount of time my job takes up on Wechat/Sina Weibo makes it difficult to fulfill my social life’s responsibilities.” Cronbach’s α was 0.85, indicating that the reliability of work–life conflict performed well.

Employee engagement

A six-item scale was adopted from previous studies (Soane et al., 2012), including “I focus hard on my company’s activities” and “I concentrate on my company’s activities”. Cronbach’s α was 0.93, indicating that the reliability of employee engagement performed well.

Work–life segmentation preference

A four-item scale was adopted from previous studies (Kreiner, 2006), including “I prefer to keep work life at work” and “I don’t like to have to think about work when I’m at home.” Cronbach’s α was 0.73, indicating that the reliability of work–life segmentation preference performed well.

Results

The maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method was employed to assess the fitting effect. Various fitting indicators, including χ2/df, comparative fit index (CFI), Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), reached the recommended threshold (Kline, 2015) (χ2/df = 3.559, CFI = 0.929, TLI = 0.914, RMSEA = 0.079). The standardized root-mean-square residual (SRMR), which was the most sensitive index to model fit measure, was 0.057, lower than the recommended cutoff value of 0.080 (Kline, 2015).

Moreover, the standardized factor loading of each item exceeded 0.570, thus reaching the recommended cutoff value of 0.50 (Hair et al., 2010). Specifically, the factor loadings for work-life conflict were 0.795, 0.761, 0.719, 0.806, and 0.571, respectively. Among these values, the first four were ideal, except for the last one, which was slightly lower but still acceptable. The factor loadings for employee engagement were 0.813, 0.780, 0.840, 0.808, 0.855, and 0.868, respectively, which were well ideal. The factor loadings for work-life segmentation preference were 0.627, 0.657, 0.680, and 0.574, respectively, which were acceptable (Boley & McGehee, 2014; Fleck et al., 2012; Schnettler et al., 2021).

Since tie strength was only used as a validation of our expected platform argument, which also has been demonstrated by previous research (Shu et al., 2017). After comparing the tie strength (M_WeChat = 5.44, SD = 0.90, M_Weibo = 4.76, SD = 1.25; F (1, 401) = 39.74, p < 0.001) in WeChat and Sina Weibo to confirm our predictions. We group WeChat respondents as strong-tie group (group 1), Sina Weibo respondents as weak-tie group (group 0) to conduct the following analysis. Thus, this variable was not used in the further data analysis and the factor loadings calculations, while its value of Cronbach’s α was 0.76, indicating its reliability performed well.

Tie strength

The survey results show that the employee posts of respondents on WeChat occupies 59.2%, while accounts for 40.8% on Sina Weibo. We compare the tie strength in WeChat and Sina Weibo to validate our predictions, which also has been demonstrated by Shu et al. (2017). A one-way ANOVA test proved our assumption that individuals perceived stronger tie strength with users in WeChat than Sina Weibo (M_WeChat = 5.44, SD = 0.90, M_Weibo = 4.76, SD = 1.25; F (1, 401) = 39.74, p < 0.001). In the following analysis, we group WeChat respondents as strong-tie group (group 1), Sina Weibo respondents as weak-tie group (group 0) to compare the impact of these two tie strengths.

Effects of social media platform on employee engagement

An ANOVA test showed that employee engagement has significant difference according to social media’s tie strength. Employee engagement are lower in strong-tie social media than in weak-tie social media (M_strong = 4.26, SD = 1.34, M_weak = 4.87, SD = 1.12; F (1, 401) = 22.75, p < 0.001). H1 was supported.

Mediating effect of work-life conflict

To test whether work-life conflict was a mediator in reducing employee engagement, we first run a one-way ANOVA. The test result shows significant differences in work-life conflict, and employees perceive higher work-life conflict in strong-tie social media than weak-tie social media (M_strong = 4.07, SD = 1.13, M_weak = 4.53, SD = 1.11; F (1, 400) = 16.24, p < 0.001). See Fig. 3. Then, we conducted a bootstrapping analysis, which is the mainstream method currently used to test the mediation effect. The variables were placed in the corresponding positions, and SPSS PROCESS Macro (Model 4) was performed using 5,000 resamples (Hayes, 2017).

Fig. 3.

The indirect effect of social media platform on employee engagement (via work-life conflict) versus the moderator (work-life segmentation preference), with confidence bands. The horizontal line denotes an indirect effect of zero. The vertical line represents the boundary of the region of significance

For employee engagement, the results showed that work-life conflict significantly mediated the effect of social media platform on employee engagement, with significant indirect effect (indirect effect = -0.09, SE = 0.04, 95% CI = [-0.18, -0.03]) and a significant direct effect of work-life conflict on engagement (direct effect = -0.19, SE = 0.06, 95% CI = [-0.30, -0.08]). Thus, H2 was supported. Appendix Fig. 4 presents the mediation effect.

Fig. 4.

Mediation effect on employee engagement

Moderating effect of post content

A regression analysis was employed to test the impact of the social media platform (strong- vs. weak-tie) and post content (user-oriented vs. organization-oriented) on employees’ work-life conflict. The results show significant impact of the interaction of social media platform and sharing content on employees’ work-life conflict (F (1, 401) = 4.99, p < 0.05). Then simple effect analysis was performed and the results indicated that this effect on employees’ work-life conflict is only significant for organization-oriented content (M_strong = 4.55, SD = 1.12; M_weak = 3.90, SD = 1.10; F (1, 398) = 22.25, p < 0.001). For user-oriented content, the effect is not significant (M_strong = 4.48, SD = 1.09; M_weak = 4.37, SD = 1.11; F (1, 398) = 0.28, p > 0.1). See Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.

Employees’ work-life conflict based on sharing content

To further investigate the moderating effect of post content on employee engagement, PROCESS model 7 (Hayes, 2017) was used to examine the moderation effect. The results show that the indirect effect via work-life conflict on employee engagement shows significant only in organization-oriented content (organization-oriented: indirect effect = -0.12, SE = 0.05, 95% CI = [-0.25, -0.04]; user-oriented: indirect effect = -0.02, SE = 0.04, 95% CI = [-0.11, 0.05]). Therefore, H3 was supported. Appendix Fig. 5 presents the moderation effect.

Fig. 5.

Moderation effect of post content on employee engagement

Moderating effect of work-life segmentation preference

We conducted a conditional process analysis to verify the moderating role of work-life segmentation preference (Hayes, 2017). The model 14 was performed using 5,000 samples, with the bias-corrected 95% confidence interval. Then result show that the interaction of work-life conflict and work-life segmentation preference shows significant impact on employee engagement (indirect effect = -0.31, SE = 0.07, 95% CI = [-0.45, -0.18]).

In this study, the moderated mediation effect involved was a linear function of the moderating variable. While subgroup analysis or discriminant analysis displayed indirect effects under two different values of the mediator and did not fully reflect the indirect effects of the moderator variable (Li & Yin, 2020). We conducted a floodlight analysis (i.e., the Johnson-Neyman method) to further present the conditional indirect effect under the continuous value of the moderator variable (Chang et al., 2019).

From the results (see Fig. 3), we can find that the impact of work-life conflict on employee engagement is significant for employees’ work-life segmentation preference statistically above 3.78 or under 2.83. For value of employees’ work-life segmentation preference between 2.83 and 3.78, work-life conflict has no significant impact on employee engagement. Therefore, H4 was supported.

Discussion and conclusion

Discussion of findings

This study aimed to explore the impact of employee posts shared on social media on employee engagement. Our results show that compared with weak-tie social media platforms, employee posts on strong-tie social media platforms can reduce employee engagement via the mediating role of work–life conflict. Since a strong-tie social media platform is a private, life-related platform for individuals to invest in as a life role, sharing employee posts will give individuals’ strain from their work role and lead to their perception of work–life conflict. The induced work–life conflict will reduce individuals’ engagement in employee roles. However, a weak-tie social media platform is comparative public, and on the verge of life domains, employee posts will have little integration into employees’ life demands, which will lead to a lower work–life conflict. In addition, our results reveal the moderating role of post content on social media and employees’ work–life segmentation preference. The negative impact of social media platforms on employee engagement will be more significant for employees who share organization-oriented posts and who have higher or lower work–life segmentation preferences.

First, the results revealed that a social media platform is not always a useful tool for organizations to promote self-information. Although social media usage in the workplace can create benefits for consumers and organizations (Arthur, 2012; Dreher, 2014; Y. Lee et al., 2020; Saleem & Hawkins, 2021), it may not always be beneficial for employees. The invasion of work into private life on social media has become increasingly reckless, especially in this era of involution where employees compete fiercely. Employees are required to share employee posts on personal social media to gain benefits for the organization using their social networks and interpersonal credit. Since academia is interested in identifying the boundaries of social media usage in the workforce and its effect on the employee side, the current study takes the perspective of the relationship with employees’ personal social media. The results indicate that employee engagement will be lower when sharing employee posts on strong-tie social media compared with weak-tie social media platforms.

Second, the mediating effect of work–life conflict was observed in explaining the impact of employee posts published on social media on employee engagement. According to boundary theory, individuals transfer between roles depending on the relationship with the interactive person, and they demarcate boundaries between their roles (Rizzo et al., 1970). When employees share employee posts on personal social media, they are also shifting between work roles and life roles. The demands of employee posts will strain the life role on personal social media, and this effect will be especially strong for strong-tie social media platforms. As a result, employees will suffer from work–life conflict and further reduce their engagement. This study echoes the Employee Engagement Trends Report (2021) on trends affecting employee engagement—the essential influencing factor of work–life conflict.

Besides, this study investigated the moderating effect of post content. Personal social media represents a life-sharing platform that gathers information. Not only does where employees share matter, but what they share is also important. Boundary theory has claimed that role conflict can be attenuated by the reduction of strain between two role-related demands (Zoonen et al., 2016). Thus, when the strain of demands from the two roles decreases, role conflict will reduce. In the same way, post content can play a significant role in relieving strain. When employee posts on social media are related to both life and work roles, work–life conflict will be attenuated. It was found that when sharing user-oriented employee posts on social media, employees’ work–life conflict will reduce because the act is regarded as benefiting the audiences, which is also related to the life role.

To further verify the mediation effect of work–life conflict, the moderating effect of the employees’ work–life segmentation preference was tested. This is a necessary point to investigate, especially during the current pandemic. Flexible workplace policies blur the boundary between work and life, further leading to employee burnout and lower engagement (Workplace, 2021). While supporting H4a that employees with higher work–life segmentation preferences will show an intensified impact of work–life conflict on employee engagement, the results also revealed an interesting finding—namely, that the above effect continues to be significant for employees with lower work–life segmentation preferences. Employees with high work–life segmentation preference (value above 3.78) have a stricter boundary and preference for work–life separation and are sensitive to work–life conflict. Thus, differences in the degree of work–life conflict will have a significant impact on employee engagement. In contrast, for employees with low work–life segmentation preference (value below 2.83), the boundary between work and life is blurred. Thus, there is a greater chance of spillover between life domains, and higher work–life conflict will have a more negative effect on employee engagement because of the easy transition into the life domain. This is consistent with Powell and Greenhaus (2010), and it has implications for the current situation (Dhanesh and Picherit-Duthler, 2021). Finally, for employees who have a tempered work–life segmentation preference, they have an adjusted range for work–life conflict; thus, work–life conflict will not have a significant impact on their engagement.

Theoretical contributions

Usage of employee posts on social media by organizations has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers. In examining social media’s impact on employees’ attitudes, most research investigates employees’ characteristics and organizations’ characteristics from the perspective of internal social media (Men et al., 2020b; Pitt et al., 2018; Yuan et al., 2018; Zoonen & Banghart, 2018). Our research focuses on the impact of personal social media platforms’ tie strength on employee engagement. As outlined below, we make three contributions to the research fields.

First, our work contributes to the social media literature in terms of the impact of social media platforms from a relationship perspective. To date, research related to social media’s impact on employees is mainly broad in its context, looking at such issues as recruitment and internal social media communication (Men et al., 2020a; Ouirdi et al., 2016; Song et al., 2019). In light of previous research that has not achieved a consistent conclusion toward social media use in the workforce, this research specifically investigates employees’ employee posting on personal social media platforms. In addition, considering previous research investigating social media in the workforce in terms of employees’ and organizations’ characteristics, we study social media platforms’ effects in terms of platform characteristics—namely, the tie strength of platforms—and integrate the concept of interpersonal relationships into public relations research.

Second, this research makes a novel theoretical contribution to the literature on boundary theory by applying work–life conflict from the organization field to the public relations field. Previous research has studied work–life conflict at the organizational level, considering the conflict aroused by work and family/life (Boswell and Olson-Buchanan, 2007). However, since individuals are assigned different roles when interacting with others, it is salient to ask how these roles affect other interactive activities on social media platforms. Our study reveals the underlying mechanism from boundary theory. The results show that strong-tie social media will significantly enhance employees’ work–life conflict and reduce employee engagement. What is more, we also enrich boundary theory by introducing a possible influential factor related to work–life conflict—work–life segmentation preference. Previous researchers have identified the influential factors of work–life conflict from the perspective of organizations, such as organizational structure (Siegel et al., 2005). We show that employees with higher work–life segmentation preference will be more sensitive to work–life conflict compared with employees with lower work–life segmentation preference. Thus, extending the findings to the organization field, for example, we show that an organization also needs to change its management strategy according to employees’ segmentation preferences.

Third, we offer a contribution to communication strategy in social media via introducing post content as a moderator. Much of the research has demonstrated communication strategies in social media used to enhance employees’ engagement (Ewing et al., 2019; Qi, 2019; Ruck et al., 2017). However, few studies have considered the impact of the content of these communication strategies. Here, we bring in post content on social media, showing that employees’ sharing of content can also influence the effect of social media platforms.

Practical implications

This study has significant implications for organizations. First, our results provide more guide the organizations on how to treat employees in the context of expecting social media posts. We have demonstrated that compared with weak-tie social media platforms, strong-tie social media platforms can significantly increase employees’ work–life conflict, ultimately reducing employee engagement. Therefore, it is important for organizations to guide employees to share employee posts on weak-tie social media platforms. With the emergence of weak-tie socialization, weak-tie social media platform should obtain high value as an important and effective platform for employees to share work-related posts. Besides, although perceive credibility would be higher confronted with strong-tie sharing from receiver aspect, role conflict will be higher from sharer aspect. Thus, organizations may consider weakening the punitive and mandatory aspect of the practice of employee posts. It is considered unreasonable to link the performance of this practice with employees’ salaries and promotion.

Second, our research provides guidance for organizations to better design online communication content. Because of the negative impact of strong-ties, social media platforms are only significant for sharing organization-oriented content. Therefore, organizations can provide post choices for employees to share on social media platforms. Especially for strong-tie social media platforms, organizations should provide more user-oriented content for employees to share. Moreover, this empowerment behavior can also increase employees’ organizational identification and job satisfaction.

Third, we provide guidance for organizations to motivate employees, especially in the pandemic context. Employees with higher work–life segmentation preferences are more sensitive toward work–life conflict and will exhibit negative engagement if such conflict arises. Flexible workplace policies responding to the pandemic have further decreased the physical segmentation between work and life. Therefore, it is necessary for organizations to help employees regain their engagement. For example, organizations should set different requirements for employees to choose to share employee posts on social media platforms. This flexible management can also expand to other management policies, and it will help to achieve humanized management.

Limitations and future directions

The limitations of this research can serve as ideas for future research. First, our research is limited to two social media platforms—WeChat and Sina Weibo. Social media platforms possess different attributes, and WeChat and Sina Weibo are only two representative sites that were chosen according to their platform affordances. Future research can explore the distinction of these major social platforms considering platforms’ affordances from other perspectives and investigate the possible mechanism underneath the impact of platforms’ affordances on employee engagement after work post sharing.

Second, our findings are limited to one social media activity—namely, sharing employee posts. Future studies could investigate other activities related to social media usage in the workforce. Specifically, previous research has suggested that social media has merged into employees’ daily lives in communication with co-workers and interfacing with customers (Macnamara & Zerfass, 2012). However, this raises the question of whether employees’ work outcomes will affect these activities. This study focused on a general situation of employees sharing employee posts on personal social media. Individuals who tend to seek identity affirmation will likely be willing to share employee posts on social media (Lee Cunningham et al., 2020). Future studies can find other boundaries like this to investigate employees’ sharing activities more deeply.

Third, the sample was taken from a single geographical area—that of China. Employees from different geographical and cultural backgrounds may have different working beliefs and evaluations of work–life conflict (Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013). Thus, we must be cautious about generalizing the findings to other employees with different profiles. A larger and more diversified sample is advised to obtain stronger statistical power. Besides, given the instability of Covid-19, this study did not collect data from offline companies, future research can collect data targeted at more specific industries and companies to further extend our research conclusions from offline data. Mixed methods usage should also be applied to enhance the results’ validity and reliability as well (Shi et al., 2022).

Lastly, the measurement for employee engagement is adopted from ISA Engagement Scale (Netemeyer et al., 1996). As ISA Engagement Scale consists of intellectual, affective, and social engagement, while social engagement can only be impacted by employee-subordinate interaction. To better fit the research scenario where concerns employees’ work roles conflict with life roles in personal social media, we choose intellectual and affective engagement. Given colleagues also exist on personal social media and generate peer pressure, further research can further explore the impact of employee work-post sharing on personal social media on social engagement from the perspective of colleagues’ pressure.

Appendix A

Scale measures
Tie Strength (Chen, 2020)
I have good relationships with people in Wechat/Sina Weibo
I am in close contact with the people in Wechat/Sina Weibo
I enjoy reading news stories shared by the people in Wechat/Sina Weibo
Work-life conflict (Netemeyer et al., 1996)
The demands of my work on Wechat/Sina Weibo interfere with my online social life
The amount of time my job takes up on Wechat/Sina Weibo makes it difficult to fulfill my social life’s responsibilities
Things I want to do on Wechat/Sina Weibo do not get done because of the demands of my jobs’ social media need puts on me
My job produces strain that makes it difficult to fulfill my online social network on Wechat/Sina Weibo
Due to work-related duties on Wechat/Sina Weibo, I have to make changes to my plans for family activities
Employee engagement (Soane et al., 2012)
I focus hard on my company’s activities
I concentrate on my company’s activities
I pay a lot of attention to my company’s activities
I feel positive about my company’s activities
I feel energetic in my company’s activities
I am enthusiastic in my company’s activities
Work-life segmentation preference (Kreiner, 2006)
I prefer to keep work life at work
I don’t like to have to think about work when I’m at home
I don’t like work issues creeping into my home life
I like to be able to leave work behind when I go home

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author BL. The data are not available at this time as the data also form part of an ongoing study.

Declarations

Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.