The Role of Communicative Coworkership on Internal Social Media in Creating Responsible Communication

Purpose – This paper explores communicative coworkership on internal social media (ISM) in a Danish hospital with the aim of showing how coworkership may contribute to creating responsible communication in a period of crisis.

Design/methodology/approach – The study conducts a qualitative netnographic analysis of 142 posts and 534 comments shared by employees on the hospital’s ISM. Furthermore, a discourse analytical approach has been applied to reveal how communicative coworkership is enacted.

Findings – The study demonstrates how employees enact communicative coworkership on a micro-level on ISM, and how this enactment plays an important role in creating responsible communication.

Practical implications – Creating responsible communication could be a matter of providing an ISM communication arena where employees enact communicative coworkership and share thoughts, frustrations and knowledge with each other during a crisis, and where management listens and responds to the concerns of the employees.

Originality – This study adds to the emerging research on communicative coworkership by showing, how it is unfolded on a micro level on ISM between employees who find themselves in the middle of a crisis.

Keywords - Communicative coworkership, internal listening, employee voice, internal social media, internal crisis communication, responsible communication

Paper type Case study