| Effective use of corporate Instant Messaging (IM) enables employees to speed up communication and collaboration, enhance social relationships, and create overall awareness for project collaboration at work. Such corporate IM use provides a suitable channel for searching, sharing, and acquiring information or knowledge in peer-peer, superior-subordinate, and cross-location collaboration. However, existing IM research has been rather uncertain as to how employees appropriate IM; what factors are associated with employees' IM appropriation; and what tangible outcomes will be delivered from the usage. A better understanding, clarification, and redefinition of this phenomenon are required to connect corporate IM use and IM success.;To address the lack of extant literature on IM use and IM success, this study firstly defined IM appropriation as IM use for exploitation and IM use for exploration, by adopting the notion of Subramani's (2004) IT use for exploitation and IT use for exploration. Secondly, an organizational environment factor and personal social network factor were considered to be antecedents of IM appropriation, and innovation processes and individual-level performance were included as outcomes, based on the adaptive structuration theory (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994). Drawing from this theory, a model was proposed that links decision-making authority and social capital to IM appropriation, which leads to incremental- and radical-innovation and an individual-level performance. A cross-sectional design using a Web-based survey was employed to collect data and test research hypotheses by using employees from a variety of companies in the USA.;This study sheds light on the corporate IM use process, including how social capital in one's IM network and decision-making authority affect corporate IM use, and the interaction effect of social capital and decision-making authority on corporate IM use. This study also highlights the significant role of IM use for incremental- and radical-innovation respectively; that is, this research shows that corporate IM systems are useful technologies enhancing employees' knowledge acquisition, which can lead to individual-level innovation and performance at work. However, results also lend support to some criticisms of the use of corporate IM systems. Corporate IM use for exploration could be detracting from the efficiency of employees' work. |
