Diminishing Social Capital Returns from Employee Ambassadorship: Evidence from WeChat

Abstract

In a world where employees’ online social networks (OSNs) like LinkedIn, Twitter, and WeChat can provide companies with an augmented audience, this study explores the interplay between employees’ actions as company (or firm) ambassadors—individuals who promote an organization’s messaging or products to their personal social networks—and the social capital they can activate for organizational purposes over time. While extant research has studied employee ambassadorship as largely organizationally beneficial (e.g., in reputation, client acquisition, and job applicant quality), we build from a motivated information processing perspective to establish messaging frequency and time horizon as important boundary conditions to these effects. Drawing on network diffusion data from WeChat Moments involving two Chinese interior design firms, 3,050 firm-relevant messages, and employees’ 200,240 alters, our analysis reveals diminishing returns for both OSN ambassador employees and their organizations. We find that employees who share the most firm-relevant messages experience diminishing returns over time in both their audience’s willingness to engage (via opening or re-posting the messages) and the message’s diffusion: the best ambassadors may lose the most social capital. These findings call for a more strategic approach to OSN ambassadorship to safeguard individual and, thus, organizational social capital. Our work contributes to organizational theory by offering a nuanced perspective on the limits of leveraging employee social capital for organizational gains.

Keywords: Social Capital, Social Capitalist Firms, Information Diffusion Motivated Information Processing, Employee Ambassadorship, Motivated Information Processing