Faster, Hotter, and More Linked In: Managing Social Disapproval in the Social Media Era

• Published in: The Academy of Management review 2021-04, Vol.46 (2), p.275-298
• Main Authors: Wang, Xinran, Reger, Rhonda K., Pfarrer, Michael D.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attention; Contingencies; Emotionality; Influence; Khashoggi, Jamal A; Management; Organizational behavior; Social acceptance; Social media; Social networks; Transparency
• ISSN: 0363-7425; 1930-3807
• DOI: 10.5465/amr.2017.0375

Negative social evaluations and the strategies a firm employs to manage them have garnered significant attention among management scholars. However, past research has given less attention to the social media era's revolutionary effects on these dynamics. In the present paper, we theorize that the social media era's greater velocity, emotionality, and communality increase the likelihood that social disapproval will spread faster and more empathetically among a more heterogeneous set of constituents. We develop a framework that explicates how a firm's response strategies can prevent, contain, and attenuate "social disapproval," which we define as constituents' general enmity toward a firm. Our framework predicts that a firm's greater initial transparency is more likely to prevent social disapproval, while a reticent response to others' initial disclosures is more effective at containing it. Once social disapproval has spread, however, we posit that a firm can more effectively attenuate it by responding more deliberatively and accommodatively. Further, we theorize how traditional media era contingencies of event severity, actor prominence, and message inauthenticity take on additional meaning and have unexpected effects on the social disapproval management process in the social media era.