Just for the Fun of It? Towards a Model for Assessing the Individual Benefits of Employees' Enterprise Social Software Usage

Complementary to the increasing popularity of social Web sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) in the private realm, social software has also drawn the attention of organizations in recent years, leading to increasing adoption rates of enterprise social software platforms (ESSPs) in organizations. Often motivated by employees' changing communication behavior and demands, companies tend to disregard the business motives for social software adoption, namely the benefits the tools provide to the users. To identify such benefits, we collected a rich set of qualitative data aiming at investigating the benefits social software users gain by using ESSPs. Based on the collected data as well as on theory, we propose a conceptual model comprising the potential benefits that ESSP usage brings about and the contextual factors influencing the identified usage-performance relationships.