Leaders on LinkedIn:Identity performance and discursive legitimation

In the context of strategic business communication, LinkedIn creates opportunities for professional networking as well as individual and corporate impression management (see e.g., Fullwood, 2019; Paliszkiewicz &amp; Mądra-Sawicka, 2016).<br/>In the paper, we will discuss how leaders perform their identities on LinkedIn to legitimize not only their own managerial roles but also corporate actions and issues to internal and external audiences (Vaara &amp; Tienari, 2008). Taking a critical, and multimodal (Machin &amp; Mayr, 2012), discursive approach to social media data (Khosravinik, 2017), we analyse a corpus of posts from two business and two NGO leaders, collected in a 3-year period from 2023-2025. The leaders had been nominated ‘leaders of the year’ in 2024 by the Danish professional (labour/collective) association ‘Lederne’.<br/>The (preliminary) analysis reveals that leaders will present personal reflections and narratives to support the dual purpose of constructing a positive image of their leadership and the organisation they represent, e.g., contributing to employer branding. Thus, the combination of personal comments and corporate interests will present users with a persona that is committed, timely and credible paving the way for individual and corporate legitimacy. This strategy, it seems, is supported by the characteristics of the platform, allowing for both text and multiple visuals in posts, with which users may engage emotionally, while also reflecting broader corporate interests.<br/>The study contributes to research on discursive legitimation (Vaara et al., 2024), by spotlighting dynamics of leader communication and corporate positioning, through the relationship between textual and visual means.<br/> <br/>References<br/>Fullwood, C. (2019). Impression management and self-presentation online. In A. Attrill-Smith, C. Fullwood, M. Keep, &amp; D. J. Kuss (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of cyberpsychology (pp. 35–56). Oxford University Press.<br/>Khosravinik, M. 2017. Social media critical discourse studies (SM-CDS). In Flowerdew, J., &amp; J. E. Richardson (Eds), The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies (pp. 752-769). Routledge.<br/>Machin, D., &amp; Mayr, A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction. Sage.<br/>Paliszkiewicz, J., &amp; Mądra-Sawicka, M. (2016). Impression management in social media: The example of LinkedIn. Management, 11(3), 203-212.<br/>Vaara, E., &amp; Tienari, J. 2008. A discursive perspective on legitimation strategies in multinational corporations. The Academy of Management Review, 33(4), 985-993.<br/>Vaara, E., Aranda, A. M., &amp; Etchanchu, H. (2024). Discursive legitimation: An integrative​theoretical framework and agenda for future research. Journal of Management, 50(6),​2343-2373.