In Activity Based Working Environment (ABWE) offices, employees are allowed increased autonomy and are expected to choose where, when, with whom, and to some degree with what, to work; in other words, employees are expected to self-lead to a higher degree and to coordinate and align with colleagues. Effects of these expectations on employees’ cognitive stress and performance are understudied. In the present study, Swedish ABWE workers (N = 416) are compared with workers in cell offices (N = 30) and landscape offices (N = 64), and relationships of self-leadership, information richness, and autonomy with cognitive stress and performance were examined using regression analysis. Results show no relationship between office type and outcomes. For cognitive stress, information richness had the largest negative relationship, followed by self-leadership: goal-setting and autonomy. For performance, self-leadership: goal-setting had the largest positive relationship, followed by information richness. This suggests that when organizational situations cannot be strongly structured – for example because the best work process is not known, or innovation or different collaboration constellations are needed – they need instead to be enriched so that employee orientation and coordination do not become too much of a burden on the individual employee, disrupting cognitive functioning and performance.

Purpose

This paper investigates the everyday CEO communication in social media, with particular focus on Twitter. The purpose is to contribute with insights on how expectations on corporate leaders to be present in social media are translated into everyday communication practice and thereby add to literature on narrative leadership.

Design/methodology/approach

A content analysis of the twitter feed of Håkan Nygren, the CEO of the Swedish digital bank Nordnet. In order to answer the question – what are the stories and the rhetoric of a CEO in the banking sector an ordinary day? – the data set covers the totality of tweets by Nygren from April, 10, 2013 to December, 31, 2015.

Findings

The everyday Twitter narrative of Nyberg challenges established ideas of social media about personalised tone and interactions by highlighting three characteristics: (a) limited scope of actors and content including the local Nordnet sphere; (b) a formal tone in the tweets mainly based on corporate information and presentation; and (c) few examples of dialogue and a limited number of voices outside of Nordnet. The dataset of Nyberg’s Twitter feed during a period without any major events or crises for Nordnet paints a picture of a rather non-personal CEO with limited ideas on his mind to share online and with few friends.

Originality/value

Studies on social media and corporate communication have largely focused on organisational crises. This study focuses on everyday narratives of managers and proves that the role of social media must be interpreted more broadly and as playing multiple roles, and that these roles are changing due to time and situation.

Politicians’ clear separation between their professional and private lives has been challenged by a growing need to be seen as personable, especially on social media where this is the norm. Little, however, is known about the effect on a political party when its politicians reveal aspects of their private lives on social media. The present study addresses this question. Through the lens of self-presentation theory, we are the first to test the effect of a balanced presentation strategy on Twitter (i.e., tweets that involve both professional and private aspects of their lives) as opposed to a strictly professional one. A longitudinal design was adopted with 265 Twitter users as participants. The results showed that a balanced strategy increased both interest in the politician’s party and intention to vote for that party, irrespective of a user’s political interest, social media usage intensity, or age, or the gender of either the user or the communicating politician. Furthermore, liking the tweets emerged as a crucial mediator. This study contributes valuable knowledge on self-presentation strategies of politicians specifically, and more broadly regarding self-presentation in the face of context collapse. However we call for future research to validate our experimental findings in a real-life setting. Implications are provided for political parties and others.