Communicative Leadership on Internal Social Media: A way to employee engagement?

This study explores interactions on internal social media (ISM) in a Danish bank in order to understand how communicative leadership is enacted in social media dialogues within an organizational context. Three months of posts, comments, and likes from September to November 2018 were analyzed to identify communicative leadership roles and communicative leadership behaviors. Three types of communicative leadership arose in this study: formal communicative leadership, co-constructed communicative leadership, and peer communicative leadership. Communicative leadership was further identified in communicative acts such as setting directions, making sense, solving problems, and listening. The findings suggest that communicative leadership is co-constructed in interactions between managers and employees as well as in interactions among employees. In this respect, communicative leadership on ISM is not only enacted by formal managers; it is enacted just as much by knowledgeable individual organizational members and it is also co-constructed by groups of employees. In this respect, the findings help us understand leadership as a complex set of interactions in organizational contexts and know that empowering communication on ISM can therefore enhance employee engagement.