Leveraging enterprise social media for total quality management: the impact of affordances on employee digital performance

In the digital era, a growing number of organizations use enterprise social media (ESM) for daily work. Current total quality management (TQM) research primarily focuses on traditional quality management tools, while the impact of emerging digital-era tools such as ESM on TQM practices remains underexplored. Drawing on affordance theory, this paper proposes and tests a model examining the relationships between ESM affordances (association, visibility, persistence, and editability) and digital performance. Using survey data from 314 employees across various industries in China, and structural equation modeling is employed to evaluate the hypotheses. The findings reveal that ESM affordances significantly enhance employee engagement, which further improves employees’ digital-enabled task and innovative performance. Moreover, the moderating influence of communication visibility is dual in nature: it dampens the positive effect of employee work engagement on digital innovation, while concurrently enhancing the contribution of organizational engagement to innovative outcomes. These results contribute to the theoretical understanding of how digital-era tools affect performance and offer practical insights for organizations on leveraging digital tools to reduce collaboration costs, enhance flexibility, and improve the timeliness of TQM implementation.