Work Related Social Media - Particularly Beneficial for Employees With Low Job Resources

Abstract

The use of social media, both in people’s personal lives and work lives, is rapidly expanding. This brings up new kinds of questions related to well-being at work and social media. One of the major concepts about well-being at work is work engagement. The positive and fulfilling mindset of work engagement is positively affected by job resources. Work related social media could be one of these job resources as it, for example, eases up the communication processes at work. In this master thesis, the relationship between work related social media use and work engagement is investigated. Also the moderative effect of job resources and age in this equation is examined. The participant pool included Finnish workers (N=1817) between the ages of 18 and 65 (M=41.8, SD=12.2) years with 53.2% being males (n=966). In addition to basic statistical analyses, regression and moderation analyses were run. The dependent variable investigated was work engagement and independent variable was a frequency of work related social media use. Results suggested that there is a positive relationship between work related social media use and work engagement. Also, it seems like less job resources one has the stronger the relationship is.