Investigating the relationship between workplace conflict and employee agility: The role of enterprise social media

Abstract The current research aims to investigate the relationship between workplace conflict and employee agility in firms that adopt enterprise social media (ESM). Using the information processing perspective, this study proposes a model for examining how task conflict and relationship conflict relate to employee agility and how ESM moderates these relationships. The regression analysis results are based on 161 respondents who adopted ESM in the workplace, and are used to examine the impact of task and relationship conflict on employee agility. The results show that relationship conflict has a U-shaped curvilinear relationship with employee agility. Conversely, the association between task conflict and employee agility is has an inverted U-shaped relationship. Moreover, the link between task conflict and employee agility is moderated by ESM usage, such that the curvilinear relationship is weakened by ESM usage. This study contributes to extant ESM literature by investigating workplace conflict and its role in developing employee agility in ESM environments. The findings indicate that managers should implement appropriate strategies to maintain a certain level of conflict in order to facilitate and achieve employee agility.

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