Enterprise social media (ESM) are widely adopted in the organizations with the aim of improving employees' work performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effects of work context characteristics on the relationships between proactive motivations and usage behaviors of ESM communication and task collaboration feature sets. Design/methodology/approach Questionnaire surveys were used to gather data from 307 randomly chosen Chinese employees, who were also ESM users. The research model was examined using linear regression methods with the SPSS 24 software package. Findings The results indicate that work context characteristics (i.e. task interdependence and perceived organizational support) had significant moderating effects on the relationships between proactive motivations and usage behaviors.Originality/valueBy extending the model of proactive motivation to the ESM context, this study directly addresses how users can be energized to use ESM features.