"It Is Comparison That Makes People Miserable": Enterprise Social Media Visibility, Social Comparison Orientation,...

As enterprise social media (ESM) visibility increasingly exposes employees' work-related behaviors and competencies to organizational audiences, its potential negative psychological consequences remain underexplored. Grounded in social comparison theory and adopting the three-stage "selection, appraisal, and response" research framework, this study investigates whether and how ESM visibility fosters workplace impostor thoughts and, in turn, influences employees' knowledge-sharing behavior and workplace well-being. Moreover, this research further examines the boundary role of social comparison orientation in shaping these effects. A two-wave, multi-source survey design was employed to test the proposed hypotheses. Data were collected from employees and their immediate supervisors in four companies across the finance, IT, management consulting, and education industries in China. To reduce common method variance, data collection was separated by a two-week interval. The final sample consisted of 447 matched employee-supervisor dyads. Hypotheses were tested using correlation and multiple regression analyses conducted in SPSS 23.0 and Mplus 8.3. Mediation and moderated mediation effects were examined using the PROCESS macro (Version 3.5) with 5000 bootstrap resamples. ESM visibility exhibited a significant positive association with workplace impostor thoughts and exerted a negative indirect effect on employees' knowledge sharing and workplace well-being through workplace impostor thoughts. Moreover, social comparison orientation strengthens the positive effect of ESM visibility on workplace impostor thoughts, as well as the indirect effects of ESM visibility on knowledge sharing and workplace well-being via workplace impostor thoughts. The findings elucidate the relationship between enterprise social media (ESM) visibility and workplace impostor thoughts, highlighting the mediating role of workplace impostor thoughts and the moderating role of social comparison orientation. These findings suggest that ESM visibility generates unintended negative outcomes and complements research on the contextual antecedents of workplace impostor thoughts. Moreover, this study extends social comparison theory to explain employee responses to digital workplace visibility.