How Employees’ Roles and Communication Responsibility Play a Role in an Ideation Process on Internal Social Media

This article contributes to the emerging research on employees’ communication roles and responsibility. The article explores how and why employees actas responsible communicators while shifting between different roles in anideation process on internal social media. The empirical material consists ofonline observations of employee ideation on internal social media and 14interviews with employees in a Danish knowledge-intensive organization.Drawing on identity work and discourse analysis, this article analyzes thedifferent roles that employees enact, shift and position themselves in whengenerating ideas on internal social media. The analysis identified eightdifferent communication roles: Diplomat, Expert, Forecaster, Veteran,Facilitator, Investigator, Skeptic, and Apprentice. The role framework provides new knowledge on the diversity and characteristics of employees’ roleson a micro-level and how they complement each other in driving the ideation process forward. This framework may provide managers with an analytical lens to identify potential challenges related to role enactment atdifferent stages of the process. Awareness of the different roles and theirsignificance for the process may also encourage employees to overcomebarriers such as insecurity and fear of critical reactions from their colleagueswhen they generate ideas online in a context of volatility, uncertainty,complexity and ambiguity