The Leadership Identity Presented on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has evolved in a way similar to other social media platforms but is unique in that it focuses on professional networking and careers. Many professionals seek to showcase their leadership skills and philosophies as part of a publicly showcased online persona. This paper aimed to examine the posts specific to leadership and thematically investigate presentation strategies, motivation, and purposes behind the posts. The paper begins with a historical review from the inception of LinkedIn through pivotal milestones in the history of the company. Key concepts from the literature are then reviewed specific to social media use and motivations behind the compulsion to share thoughts and philosophies publicly. The process of collection and validation measures was examined. The study used 4,000 posts from 10 leadership keywords and 1,000 posts captured from 2 leadership-specific user groups. The user posts were analyzed through 3 rounds of coding, focusing on thematic concentrations. The 3 major themes identified were (1) self-promotion, (2) organizational promotion, and (3) network sensemaking. Several subthemes were identified: appreciation, cautionary rants, leadership memes, and humblebragging. The posts were also sampled and analyzed for artificial intelligence-generated content, and the results of the sample showed a probability of having 12.3% non-human content. A motivation for trying to capture the manifestation of public leadership on LinkedIn was to start a new conversation about leadership research that begins with the individual persona.