The assumption to date is that social media usage at work is an unfortunate distraction. Drawing from affective events theory (AET), we suggest that social media usage can be both detrimental and beneficial as it relates to creativity through affective-laden processes. Specifically, we hypothesize a dual-process model whereby daily social media usage at work is negatively related to daily creativity through task distraction and positively related to daily creativity through emodiversity (i.e., the richness and evenness of experienced emotions). Additionally, we evaluate extraversion as a boundary condition of this model. We expected that employees higher in extraversion would more efficiently process social media-induced stimulations, attenuating the detrimental pathway via task distraction and enhancing the beneficial pathway via emodiversity. We investigated these hypotheses using an experience sampling methodology (four times a day across 10 business days) and surveyed 145 full-time employees. All of our hypotheses were supported. The implications of this work contribute to several areas of research, including social media usage at work, emotions at work, and creativity.
