Research On The Impact Of Incentive Mechanisms Within Enterprise Social Networks On Employee Behavior

In WEB2.0, enterprise social network is a unique internal communications channel, which provides various opportunities for internal information distribution and exchanging, thereby fulfilling the current needs for creating thoughts, knowledge and value within companies. However, lots of enterprise managers have faced the fact that their employee’s participation and activity kept dropping as time goes by. How to maintain the enthusiasm and motivation within enterprise social networks and encourage employees to contribute to the enterprise social networks is an important issue. As so far, it is rare to see the articles studying the incentive mechanism online and the effects of online incentive mechanism. The research about incentive mechanism of enterprise social networks is also quite blank now. Therefore, it is a meaningful and practical study to examine the impact of online incentive mechanism on employees and explore potential values brought by enterprise social networks for enterprises.Therefore, our study examines the impact of incentive mechanism on employee behaviors to explore the value created by enterprise social networks for enterprises and employees. In this study, we conduct an empirical method based on millions of blog content data within internal blog platform of a Telecommunications Company. We used econometric method and analyzed more than40thousand employees’personal information and blog data during from2010-2013. We built five regression models, which are adoption model, heterogeneity model, performance model, and turnover model. We differentiated our points based incentive mechanism into group-level and individual level to study the different impact of these two incentive plans. We found the positive impact of points based incentive mechanisms on user participation, social relationships, job security. Our findings indicate that group incentives increase higher participation within enterprise social networks, and also could strengthen the interpersonal relationships between employees, which have positive impact on employee performance and retention. While, individual incentives will bring lower participation within enterprise social networks so as to decrease the interpersonal relationships between employees.Our theory model and findings provide practical managerial implications for enterprise managers and designers of social network platforms.