Paving the Way for Social CEOs: An Exploration on Using Social Media in Leadership Communication

摘要

According to industry reports, a strong CEO's social presence enhances the company's reputation and CEOs own image. However, most executives still fail to integrate social media into their communication mechanisms. Indeed, in 2015, only 7 out of the FTSE 100 CEOs are active Twitter users (Williams, 2015). Lack of management understanding has been recognized as the main obstacle to business social media adoption (Kiron et al., 2012). One of the motivations that drive CEOs to be social is to engage in leadership communication. As a result, the leadership styles that CEOs strive to achieve, whether they are transformational or transactional, may determine their social media strategy. CEOs' perceptions of the degree of the narcissism of using social media for impression management and their sentiments toward such uses could also influence their approaches. Based on these two factors, the paper identifies four CEOs' mental models of leadership communication. Following the impression management literature, CEOs' social media strategies can be characterized based on two dimensions, professionalism of the message content and proactiveness level of their social media activities. This study investigates how each of the mental models uniquely affects how CEOs conceptualize and determine their social media strategies.