How do strategic leaders engage with social media? A theoretical framework for research and practice

• Author: Christina Kyprianou,Marten Risius,Zeki Simsek,Ciaran Heavey
• Published date: 01 August 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3156
• Date: 01 August 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

How do strategic leaders engage with social

media? A theoretical framework for research

and practice

Ciaran Heavey

1

| Zeki Simsek

2

| Christina Kyprianou

2

|

Marten Risius

3

1

UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

2

Department of Management, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina

3

Department of Business Information Systems, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Correspondence

Ciaran Heavey, UCD Michael Smurfit

Graduate Business School, University

College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

Email: ciaran.heavey@ucd.ie

Abstract

Research summary:Social media is a powerful

medium for examining strategic leaders' novel interac-

tions and influence within and outside the firm. But,

while studies on social media are popping up like kettle

corn across disciplines, no conceptual framework for

organizing, guiding, and inspiring research on social

media engagement among strategic leaders has yet

appeared. Toward this end, we first clarify the construct

and develop a typological conceptualization of strategic

leaders' social media engagement behaviors. Next, we

introduce a theoretical framework and corresponding

propositions for explaining the variations, mechanisms,

and consequences of social media engagements. We

conclude with implications for future research, includ-

ing data collection and measurement.

Managerial summary:With the growing proliferation

of social media platforms, today's executives are faced

with a vast array of choices about how to use social

media to engage with diverse stakeholders and online

communities. Although avoidance continues to be a

preference for many executives, the scale and scope of

social media platforms offer executives unprecedented

opportunities—as well as risks—to engage stakeholders.

Received: 24 October 2018 Revised: 30 January 2020 Accepted: 5 February 2020 Published on: 28 April 2020

DOI: 10.1002/smj.3156

1490 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat Mgmt J. 2020;41:1490–1527.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/smj

We develop and illustrate a framework of six archetypal

engagement behaviors through which executives may

leverage social media to reach, communicate, and inter-

act with stakeholders in developing and executing

strategy—for both good and ill. We then discuss the

implications of these alternative playbooks for executive

decision-making and firm outcomes.

KEYWORDS

Social media engagement, strategic leaders, CEOs and executives

1—Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, Inc., posted on his Facebook page that Netflix users were

viewing “nearly a billion hours per month”of video on Netflix (Jennings, Blount, and Weatherly,

2014). After the posting, Netflix's stock price increased. This led to an investigation by the Secu-

rities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which contended that Hastings's post was material,

and was disclosed only to his Facebook followers and not the public at large, thus violating Reg-

ulation FD (SEC Report of Investigation, 2013).

2—Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, posted on December 25, 2016, “If @Airbnb could launch

anything in 2017,what would it be?”Less than 24 hours after the thread began, Chesky reported

having received more than 1,000 ideas—from adding cleaning services and meal booking

options to improving the brand's corporate social responsibility.

Strategy research has long recognized the role of mass media outlets, journalists, and finan-

cial analysts as key information and influence intermediaries between strategic leaders and rele-

vant stakeholders (Pfarrer, Pollock, & Rindova, 2010; Zavyalova, Pfarrer, Reger, &

Shapiro, 2012). By selecting and framing salient issues, these intermediaries set the agenda for

stakeholder discourse about firm behavior (Deephouse, 2000; Petkova, Rindova, & Gupta, 2013;

Zavyalova et al., 2012), thereby shaping firm identity and reputation (Carroll &

McCombs, 2003; Kjaergaard, Morsing, & Ravasi, 2011). However, as the opening vignettes illus-

trate, social media is offering strategic leaders new and unique affordances for interacting with

stakeholders (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017).

Social media allows leaders to directly communicate with employees and customers

(Alghawi, Yan, & Wei, 2014; Huang & Yeo, 2018), exercise control over the tone, cadence, and

timing of disclosures (Jung, Naughton, Tahoun, & Wang, 2018), and build trust with investors

and financial communities (Elliott, Grant, & Hodge, 2018; Grant, Hodge, & Sinha, 2018). Apart

from sharing information, strategic leaders can use social media to gather firsthand, unfiltered

intelligence. For example, Microsoft's Satya Nadella uses social media as a way of identifying

early warning signals and threats (Thomas & Silverstone, 2015). As power becomes more dif-

fused and dispersed across ecosystem partners, strategic leaders are also turning to social media

for garnering attention, soliciting support, and accessing resources (Castello, Etter, &

Nielsen, 2016). And as the complexity of organizational problems grow, social media provides a

platform for facilitating interfirm collaboration and knowledge cocreation (Leonardi,

Huysman, & Steinfield, 2013; Seidl & Werle, 2018). In this regard, one of the more powerful

affordances of social media is that it can facilitate more “open”approaches to decision-making,

incorporating ideas, knowledge, and resources dispersed across employees, partners,

HEAVEY ET AL.1491

communities, and customers (Baptista, Wilson, Galliers, & Bynghall, 2017; Dobusch &

Kapeller, 2018; Hautz, 2017; Hautz, Seidl, & Whittington, 2017; Seidl, von Krogh, &

Whittington, 2019; Tavakoli, Schlagwein, & Schoder, 2017; Whittington, 2019).

Although these affordances are already being used by some strategic leaders to enhance firm

reputation (Burke & Martin, 2012; Tsai & Men, 2017), improve employee-organization relations

(Men, 2015), and even boost stock returns (Chen, Hwang, & Liu, 2018), there is also a darker

underbelly to social media engagements—as one of the opening vignettes illustrates. Strategic

leaders can use social media to create a veil of vagueness in corporate disclosures, or conversely

to overwhelm stakeholders with a proliferation of extraneous information designed to distract

from the core issue or news of the day. Strategic leaders can also use social media to contrive

controversy and online debate with the intent of drawing attention toward the firm (Huang &

Yeo, 2018), but without good judgment and political finesse, leaders may end up compromising

their own and/or their firm's reputation. Given the reach and velocity of social media, the dam-

age may occur at a more rapid even viral pace compared to traditional channels (Wang,

Reger, & Pfarrer, n.d.). Used in these ways, social media engagement has the potential to tar-

nish the firm's reputation, undermine the credibility of its leadership, and damage stakeholder

relations.

Strategy theory and research on the social media engagements of strategic leaders' remain

disjointed and in need of a broader and richer framework for research and practice. First, there

has been neither clarity surrounding the construct nor a conceptualization to situate the con-

struct within strategy theory. We reach this conclusion based on a systematic review that points

to an entangled spaghetti of insights across studies and disciplines (see Appendices A and B for

further details). Second, while prior studies suggest that strategic leaders vary in the level and

forms of their social media engagement, no work has so far offered a holistic conceptualization

and elaboration. Finally, a framework that situates social media engagement within the context

and constraints of strategic work—and advances understanding of the impetus for and implica-

tions of such engagements—is necessary to inform and advance both research and practice.

Our intent, therefore, is to add scholarly heft to the topic by addressing each of these interre-

lated limitations. Synthesizing insights across a variety of studies, we define the social media

engagement of strategic leaders as a set of behaviors through which strategic leaders seek to lever-

age social media affordances to communicate with stakeholders in developing and executing strat-

egy. Recognizing that leaders vary in why (information processing vs. social influence) and how

they use social media (reciprocal vs. nonreciprocal exchanges), we then propose, discuss, and

illustrate six engagement patterns—conveyance,evangelization,discourse,mobilization,obfusca-

tion, and celebritization. These patterns capture the nuances of social media engagement rather

than assume uniform engagement. We build on this conceptualization to introduce a frame-

work and corresponding propositions for understanding the variations, impetus, mechanisms,

and consequences of the engagement patterns for executive decision-making and firm

outcomes.

1|THEORETICAL REVIEW AND CONCEPTUALIZATION

The conceptualization, typology, and framework we propose in the paper are grounded in

research on open views of strategy, as well as the insights we capture from a systematic review

of 64 social media articles (for a study-by-study review, please refer to Online Appendix B). This

research suggests that although the development of strategy may still be led by upper-echelons

1492 HEAVEY ET AL.