Effect of Social Media on Organizational Innovations through Leader Member Exchange: An Organizational Communication Perspective

Social media is playing a significant role in organizational communication, and LMX is contributing to strong relationships with leaders and members who contribute to organizational innovation. This research paper aims to research whether social media is weakening LMX for organizational innovation. This paper analyses 217 sample data gathered through convenient and snowballed sampling, and SPSS & AMOS have been used for structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses. The hypothesis test has proved that social media do not significantly affect organizational innovation and whether LMX has a partial mediating effect between social media and organizational innovations. This study contributes to the social exchange literature and empirical test of the structural model where social media communication directly affects organization innovation, and LMX has full mediation. Therefore, LMX is not very much strong in developing countries like Bangladesh, and social media is to weakening it. In other words, social media seem important for innovation, but LMX still has high value for organizational innovation and management. So in the era of digital technology, social media supports horizontal communication, and leader-member exchange for vertical communication is necessary for organizational innovation. This research has observed some limitations in the analysis of constructs. Here observed variables are limited only to social media, LMX, and organizational innovations. In that case is a scope to find out social media’s impact on organizational innovation through multiple samples like responses from leaders and members, considering other variables like Top management support and IT support as mediators. In addition, this model can be tested in developing countries with organizational recognition using social media. Lastly, this paper adds value to communication theory focusing on the importance of LMX and social media for organizational innovations in this technological era.