The Brown Center invites you to our Faculty Spotlight on Wednesday, April 7th at 12:00 PM on Blackboard Ultra. The spotlight series is a showcase of research, creative inquiry, and other scholarly engagement of the campus community. Stop by and learn about the research of our talented Stetson community!
Dr. Juanne Greene – Assistant Professor of Human Resources Management
Department of Management
To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Understanding Executives Propensity to Utilize Social Media to Mislead
As social media fast becomes a prominent vehicle through which corporate information is disseminated, researchers have begun to investigate the outcomes of its use by corporate leaders (Lei, Li, and Luo, 2019). Executives’ inappropriate use of Twitter to influence stakeholders is increasing, leading to questions regarding the motivation behind its use and the cognitive determinants of potentially unethical tweeting behavior. While some leaders engage social media for vision/value alignment, collaboration, or establishing community, others may seek to garner attention/acclaim or to under- over-inform or mis- or dis-inform stakeholders (Heavey, Simsek, Kyprianou, Risius, 2020). It is the latter motivation that the current study attempts to understand. Here we seek to investigate factors that lead corporate leaders to convey misleading information using Twitter. Addressing work done on my summer 2020 grant, I discuss the project status and how the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) will be used to explore individual and contextual factors that influence intentions to mislead. In an effort to expand our understanding of unethical leadership, the study also considers the antecedents of unethical decision-making.
Juanne Greene is an Assistant Professor of Management in the School of Business Administration. Her research interests include employee perceptions and attitudes, individual differences, and the dynamics between employees and their work environment.