A study of relationship between transformational leadership and task performance: the role of social media and affective organisational commitment

In today's society, social media have become an almost essential part of everyday life, particularly in the organisations where almost every employee and manager/leader use social media. Recently scholars have started to investigate leader's communication with their employees by using social media. However, leader's role in motivating their followers to use this innovation and increase performance is ignored by researchers. Using social capital theory as a base, the objectives of the present study are to examine the role of social media and affective organisational commitment between the relationship of transformational leadership (TFL) and employee's task performance (ETP). The proposed model was tested with the data collected from 254 employees from insurance companies situated in China. Model was tested by PLS-SEM with using SmartPLS 3. Findings of the study suggest that transformational leadership has a direct positive relationship with task performance and affective organisational commitment as well as indirect positive relationship via social media on task performance. This study contributes to the existing literature in the field of social media, leadership, commitment, and performance. Implications, limitations and future research are discussed.