The Paradoxical Effect of Social Media Usage on Developer Creativity and the Moderating Role of Openness to Experience

摘要

Developer creativity is vital for software companies to innovate and survive. Studies on social media have yielded mixed results about its impact on creativity due to the ubiquitous nature of social media. This research differentiates the effects of informational and socializing social media usage on both incremental and radical creativity and explore the moderating role of a developer's openness to experience. Based on a survey of software developers, the authors show that openness positively moderates the impact of informational social media usage on incremental and radical creativity and negatively moderates the impact of socializing social media usage on both types of creativity. There is a stronger positive moderation for the relationship between informational social media usage and radical creativity compared to incremental creativity. The results provide a foundation for understanding explanations of the paradoxical effect of social media usage on creativity.