The role of social media usage in enhancing team members' trust and team creativity

Abstract

The rapid development and increasing popularity of social media has drastically changed online creation. Social media has been widely adopted by organizations over the past decade, which provides opportunities to open up team creativity and innovation processes. This study aims to examine how the social media usage influences team creativity in organizations. Moreover, we examine how trust is affected by social media usage and further affects team creativity. Drawing on the literature of social media and team creativity in organizations, we develop a theoretical framework to explain how social media usage influences team creativity through cognitive trust and affective trust. The result of this study confirms the significant effect of both cognitive trust and affective trust on team creativity and the influence of social media usage on both types of trust. In addition, our findings showed that cognitive trust positively affects affective trust. Based on the results, we also provided theoretical and practical implications.