Posters versus Lurkers - Analyzing the Motivations for Participation in Enterprise Social Networks

While organizations are increasingly implementing Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) to foster collaboration across organizational boundaries, few have been successful in motivating a substantial number of members to actively participate within such networks, and many ESNs fail owing to a lack of contributors. One of the main reasons for this dilemma is the fact that most employees only read and consume content (lurking), and very few actively participate and create content (posting). While a major research strand has studied motivations for posting and lurking behaviors in online communities, there is little research on motivations in ESNs. To bridge these gaps, this study examines whether posters and lurkers differ in their motivations to use ESNs. Building on social exchange theory, we analyze the impact of the underlying motivational factors such as common identity, common bond, social interaction, and community commitment, which have not yet been studied in the ESN context. We test our propositions with data collected from 4,892 respondents in a large knowledge-intensive multinational company. We are able to distinguish between five user groups (super frequent posters, frequent posters, infrequent posters, frequent lurkers and infrequent lurkers) with super frequent posters showing significantly higher mean values for all motivational drivers to use the ESN compared to the other user groups.