Professionals Must Walk a Tightrope on Social Media

Election Loss Lessons for Democrats

By Daniel Butcher

Leading up to the 2024 U.S. election, Democratic candidates needed to do a better job of keeping their fingers on the pulse of American voters and taking their concerns about jobs and the high cost of living seriously, rather than insisting on painting a rosy picture of the economy, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Pollock noted a disconnect between Democratic politicians’ messages and what swing voters wanted to hear.

“People are saying, ‘I’m upset about this. This is what I see in my daily life,’ and Democrats talked at a more general, abstract level, saying, ‘It’s really not that bad because of this, that, and the other thing,’ and voters think, ‘Yeah, that’s nice, but that’s not my reality,’” Pollock said. “And so if you really want to influence somebody, especially when they’re having a really strong, visceral, negative emotional response, you have to try to understand where they’re coming from, acknowledge their pain, and talk about where they’re at.

“Even if you can’t come up with a perfect solution or what you’re proposing isn’t going to really be feasible, people are going to feel better if they think they’re acknowledged and recognized,” he said. “That’s similar to what we founding the research studywe did about social-media influencers, who are effective at talking about people, saying ‘you’ not ‘me,’using language that conveys an understanding of where their audience is coming from, and talking to them about their issues—that’s what people want.

“They want to they want to feel seen and heard.”

Media Magnify Scandals of Big-Name Companies

By Daniel Butcher

Companies that dominate their industries also have to deal with increased scrutiny. Any negative news, from layoffs and unethical conduct to data breaches, get amplified and can easily become scandals, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Media attention is drawn by the accused or guilty party’s prestige, he said.

“If the perpetrator is high-reputation, they may get the benefit of the doubt for less severe misconduct as some kind of one-off thing, and the media may be less likely to cover it,” Pollock said. “But if the misconduct is severe, then the media is even more likely to scandalize the high-reputation firm’s misconduct, because we don’t expect that from high-reputation firms; it violates our expectations.

“When we have high expectations about a firm’s behavior, whether because we expect them to be more competent or act with more integrity, it’s a bigger deal and more disturbing when they violate that expectation,” he said. “That makes the incident more newsworthy to the media, increasing their coverage of the misconduct.

“These are sorts of things that we’re looking at and trying to understand: What are misconduct aspects and firm characteristics lead the misconduct to become a scandal?”

Pollock and colleagues compared the reactions to data breaches at two different companies of vastly different levels of prestige and name recognition: Facebook and Chegg, a U.S. education technology company that provides homework help, textbooks, online tutoring, and other student services.

“Facebook had a data breach of 50 million accounts; it was covered widely in the media and got lots of attention—thousands of articles were written about their data breach and the problems with it,” Pollock said. “And literally on the same day, Chegg, which is an academic software company, had a similar data breach—40 million accounts were breached, but it was barely covered outside of the the specialist media on data security, and a little bit in the in the education sector.

“So why Facebook and not Chegg? Facebook is better known,” he said. “More people use Facebook and have given them their data, so the expectancy violation is greater and possibly more personal.

“Journalists recognize this, and thus are more likely to scandalize the incident, because it attracts more readers.”

How Fitness Influencers Gain Social-Media Engagement

By Daniel Butcher

Fitness influencers use various tactics to build their personal brands, attract followers, and inspire engagement on social media that can be applied to any topic or community.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that people trying to build their follower base on social-media channels need to be proactive.

“You want to post a lot and comment on others’ posts and pictures, but also put out your own pictures on Instagram or the platform of your choice that people can engage with and relate to,” Pollock said. “Looking at fitness influencers, we saw before-and-after pictures of either the influencers themselves or their clients, somebody who was heavier or not that muscular before and now here’s a picture of them and they’ve lost 50 pounds and now they’re ripped, that kind of thing.

“Or here’s a selfie; here’s a picture of the influencer doing some kind of really cool exercise,” he said. “And usually they try to do them in some sort of funky location too, so it’s not just in the gym, but they’ll be doing them on the beach or in the mountains, and those sorts of things enhance engagement.”

Pollock said that influencers who share details about their personal lives are viewed as more authentic and likeable.

“Personal stuff is something that that makes me want to know a bit more about you and allows me to connect with you as a person,” Pollock said. “These were called ‘warmth images,’ things like you in a group with other people doing social activities, pictures of you with your family or kids, these kinds of things that gave some insight into who you are as a person.

“Beyond just the fitness pics, influencers also attracted people and pulled them in with personal posts and warmth images,” he said. “And then, using positive emotional language and talking about the other person and congratulating them were ways that fitness influencers enhanced the engagement with their posts.”

Why Many Leaders Ignore Criticism

By Daniel Butcher

In the wake of the U.S. public’s reaction to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of suspect Luigi Mangione, some CEOs in the health insurance industry downplayed the tragedy, rather than thinking about the root cause of people’s anger directed toward them.

Keeping blinders on is a red flag for narcissism, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He and Arijit Chatterjee of ESSEC Business School researched narcissistic CEOs and found that the more narcissistic the executives are, the more likely they are to ignore critical messages, and surround themselves with yes-men.

“Many CEOs, especially narcissistic ones, surround themselves with people who say, ‘No, don’t listen to the critics. You’re great. You’ve done nothing wrong. Everything’s wonderful,’ as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a real problem that we need to fundamentally think through and deal with,” Pollock said. “So there’s nobody to rein in CEOs when they’re making bad decisions or alert them to a blind spot that they have.

“We all have good ideas and bad ideas, but leaders need people to tell them when they have a bad idea and to stop them from from acting on it,” he said. “When you don’t have those people in place telling the CEO to tap the brakes, the bad ideas just spread, and a narcissistic CEO doesn’t want to hear the negative stuff, whereas a less narcissistic CEO who really wants todo the best job possible will actually cultivate that and make sure they have people around them who will tell them the truth, even if it’s something that they don’t really want to hear, but that they need to hear.

“But a narcissistic CEO will fire truthsayers; they’ll get rid of people who they perceive as disloyal for telling them negative stuff or telling them that they’re wrong.”

Finding Someone to Blame for U.S. Health Insurance Woes

By Daniel Butcher

As Americans pay more and more for health insurance every year, with paperwork burdens and denials of doctor-recommended procedures, medications, and other medical services, their anger and frustration at the U.S. healthcare system continues to simmer.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that it’s difficult to go after a big, faceless $500 billion corporation, so people blame their suffering on the industry’s corporate leaders. Public discourse in the wake of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killing in December 2024 is case in point.

“The CEO is somebody that they can vent their anger on and becomes a target,” Pollock. “So I wasn’t surprised at the nature of the reaction to Thompson’s killing and the apprehension of suspect Luigi Mangione.

“I would hope that the health-insurance and benefits-administration CEOs are listening and paying attention to people’s reactions,” he said. “If they’ve been so insulated from the reality of what their companies have been doing and how it’s affecting people, hopefully this wakes them up.

“But I’m not sure, because it seems like a lot of what they’re doing is beefing up security and taking down information about boards of directors and about senior executives from their websites, as opposed to understanding where this anger is coming from.”

Pollock suggested that senior executives in the health insurance industry should look themselves in the mirror and ask: Why are they infamous? Why are these negative emotional reactions to Thompson’s killing and Mangione’s arrest so widespread?

“It’s an unfortunate extreme outcome, but it illustrates how many people are feeling about the U.S. healthcare system,” Pollock said. “There may be some CEOs who actually say, ‘Oh, my God, we really need to change what we’re doing,’ but there are a lot who are going to rationalize it, and they’re going to have their inner circles tell them, ‘It’s nothing that we’re doing wrong—it’s a crazy person who just went nuts.’

“They’ll try to downplay or rationalize away what happened, as opposed to open themselves up to thinking about the root cause of people’s anger directed towards them and their role in it,” he said.

Elon Musk Turned Celebrity to Infamy

By Daniel Butcher

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is a case study of a business founder typecast as a traditional creator, who altered his reputation by not playing to type.

Previously known for cofounding SpaceX, Tesla, the Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI, Musk changed how the media covered him and how the public saw him after buying Twitter, changing the social media’s company’s name and policies, thwarting Tesla workers’ efforts to unionize, and becoming an outspoken supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump and far-right political parties in other countries.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has done extensive research on the media’s tendency to typecast CEOs as either a traditional founder/creator or a reformer/rebel, said that most people thought Musk was the former initially, but that he’s revealed himself to be more of the latter.

“For a long time, Elon Musk was considered a creator, and he still has his fans and people who think he’s great, but he’s become a little bitless of a celebrity and a little bit more infamous to a larger segment of the population, especially with what he did with X,” Pollock said. “So there’s an example of somebody who was a creator—he made his original fortune when the online banking and payments company he founded, also called X.com, merged with Confinity to form PayPal,he played a key role in cofounding Tesla and SpaceX and is now CEO of both, and he’s started a number of other companies.

“We saw him pushing against industry norms and breaking new ground and creating these new businesses and, in some cases, new industries like privatized space travel that his companies were at the forefront of, and he got a lot of credit for that,” he said. “But then, when he goes in and buys Twitter and changes it in ways that upset many employees and users of the social-media platform, he thinks he’s engaged in the same kinds of things that made him popular—‘I’m going to turn this company around’—but made things much worse.

“As a consequence, that hurt his reputation, because he wasn’t being a creator—he was taking something that a lot of people liked and broke itfor his own ends, and that would be an example of somebody who acted against type, because we saw him as being in the creator role, then he acted like a rebel, and it’s backfired on him.”

Goodbye Twitter, hello X

Musk fired most of Twitter’s content-moderators and fact-checkers and rebranded the social-media platform X in 2022. During the 2024 U.S. election cycle, he made “false or misleading claims about the U.S. election” that were viewed billions of times on X, according to a report by nonprofit group Center for Countering Digital Hate.

“Whether or not you share his political views, the way he stripped down the company [X, formerly Twitter], he took away safety protocols, changing the way that they did the blue checkmark verification—he started selling X Premium subscriptions as a requirement to get verified,” Pollock said. “It made Twitter—now X—less trustworthy as an online community, as a social media site, and then predictably, we saw more conspiracy theories, disinformation, bots, trolling, hate speech, and so on popping up on X, with no guardrails.

“It just became a less credible place to get information, because a lot of people used it for their news andmany don’t anymore because they can’t trust the site,” he said. “As the owner and CEO of X, they blame him for it, and rightly so.”

Risks and Rewards of CEOs Getting Typecast

By Daniel Butcher

Celebrity CEOs are often typecast in the media as either traditional founders/creators or reformers/rebels. Those who live up to their reputation while running successful companies are lionized as heroes, but those who break the expectations of their type or face failure or scandal can be portrayed as villains.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that he has done extensive research on the media’s tendency to typecast CEOs.

“As far as the typecasting, we first researched factors that make them a celebrity, and we looked at different kinds of celebrity, so we so we had people who were creators,” Pollock said. “These are basically the company founders, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, the folks like this who started and founded these businesses and grew them as the CEO—that’s one kind of celebrity.

“Then there are rebels, who come in and do things that are contrary to the industry norms and really stand out and shake things up,” he said. “And there are those reformers who can look over the horizon and say, ‘This is a company is doing well right now, but I know that there are fundamental problems in the company that will likely cause its performance to go down unless we make these changes,’ so they change before things get bad to save the company.

“And then they’re the CEOs who go into a really bad situation and pull the company back from the brink to sit and save the company, and so, depending upon those kinds of non-conforming behaviors they engage in, they get typecast as a certain type of CEO.”

The first type of CEO, either founders or cofounders who are typecast as creators, include familiar names such as:

• Mark Zuckerberg of Meta
• Michael S. Dell of Dell Technologies
• Jensen Huang of Nvidia
• Marc R. Benioff of Salesforce
• Bom Kim of Coupang
• Jack Dorsey of Block (who also cofounded Twitter and Bluesky)
• Brian Chesky of Airbnb
• Tony Xu of DoorDash
• Robert Greenberg of Skechers
• Charles Liang of Super Micro Computer
• Sam Walton of Wal-Mart
• Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Blue Origin
• Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway

As for the rebel CEOs, Ralph Nader wrote The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right, in which he praised:

• John Bogle of Vanguard
• Anita Roddick of The Body Shop and Natura
• Ray C. Anderson of Interface
• Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines
• Jeno Paulucci of Luigino’s and Totino’s
• Sol Price of FedMart, Price Club, and Costco
• Robert Townsend of Avis
• Andy Shallal of Busboys and Poets
• Bernard Rapoport of American Income Life Insurance
• Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia
• Gordon B. Sherman of Midas International
• Paul Hawken of Project Drawdown, Erewhon Trading Company, Smith & Hawken, and OneSun

“Once we know CEOs’ leadership style, we’d like to see them live up to their reputation, and we have these tropes about what these sorts of people do,” Pollock said. “We like to see them keep doing the same stuff over and over.

“And so, if they try to behave in a different way than the public role they’ve been cast in, if a creator CEO tries to move in a different direction and acts like a reformer, they get penalized for it, because that’s not what we want from that kind of a hero or celebrity,” he said.

“We want to see them do these creator things and not do these reformer things.”

The Toxic Trait that Sunk South Korea’s President

By Daniel Butcher

South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law on December 3, 2024, sparking a national political crisis.

That tone-deaf declaration of martial law, recommended or enabled by the people he chose to surround himself with, could indicate narcissism, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“Look at who President Yoon appointed, who his close advisors were, how so many of his political appointees to the Defense Ministry and elsewhere on the State Council were not people with depth of experience, but rather were people he went to high school with,” Pollock said. “He surrounded himself with this close coterie of yes-men and yes-women who are going to tell him what he wants to hear and who don’t have strong credentials, so they’re even more reliant on him for their position.

“This is the kind of stuff that can happen to leaders who insulate themselves from criticism like what we saw in South Korea, where President Yoon decided to declare martial law, and it blew up in his face so spectacularly,” he said. “It wasn’t well-thought-out; even if he was trying to do what he thought was best, he didn’t even manage it very effectively, because he didn’t know that he wasn’t talking to everybody and didn’t have widespread support.

“He was more isolated by his core group of underqualified advisers who were out of touch with public opinion.”

A symptom of narcissistic leaders surrounding themselves with yes-men and ignoring other perspectives is a lack of connection with their broader communities and key audiences, Pollock said.

“Narcissism is leading them to take actions that are really hurting them and that hurt their country and create these giant crises,” he said. “Choo Kyung-ho, the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Economy, and member of the National Assembly of the Republic of South Korea is from the president’s party, and they used to be close.

“They were both prosecutors together, but then they had a falling out and President Yoon saw him as an enemy because he was no longer following along with everything that Yoon wanted to do, and narcissists can’t tolerate criticism.”

Getting Followers Is One Thing, Inspiring Engagement Another

By Daniel Butcher

To expand the reach of your social-media footprint, you need to attract more followers. But it’s trickier to encourage people to share, repost, or comment. Some types of content are more likely to get people to click the follow button, other types drive engagement better.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that gaining followers and getting them to actually engage with you are two different things, and they require different levels of commitment by the follower.

“If you’re scrolling on Instagram and see something that looks interesting, you think, ‘Here’s a cool picture—I’m gonna hit follow,’” Pollock said.

“That doesn’t take a whole lot of commitment, but to look at their other posts, to comment on their piece, perhaps, if you get a reply, to reply to the influencer’s reply, those kinds of things—that’s a much higher level of engagement,” he said.

“To share to your site or repost to your followers, those are higher levels of engagement and commitment, and they’re influenced by different things, because we’re looking at both the images and the words that were used in the influencer’s post.”

Pollock’s research on this topic focused on fitness influencers. He and Ashley Roccapriore of Auburn University found that the images, particularly those conveying “competence,” attracted more followers than the positive emotional nature of the words that they used. Positive emotional words, however, were more effective at stimulating greater engagement. That said, you don’t want to come off as braggy and self-absorbed if the goal is getting shares and comments.

“Positive emotion in your words that focus on other people are more effective than just having it be all about yourself and how great you are and how much you know,” Pollock said.

“Rather than crowing about hitting your new PR [personal record] in the deadlift or whatever, it stimulates more engagement when you show warmth by praising others for hitting their goals or telling them what they can accomplish,” he said. “This is what stimulates higher-level engagement and gets them to repost or comment on your posts.

“So, images and words, and the competence and warmth they convey, function in different ways—we process them differently and they they stimulate different levels of engagement.”

Two Factors that Make Some CEOs Celebrities

By Daniel Butcher

Some CEOs achieve celebrity through hard work, and some have celebrity thrust upon them. Some become celebrities through pure dumb luck—combined with the media’s propensity to lionize CEOs.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that he’s done research on how, why, and who becomes an A-list celebrity versus a B- or C-list celebrity.

“We looked at two different factors: push and pull,” Pollock said. “Push factors would be the CEO trying to get media attention, making themselves available, putting themselves out there, having lots of quotes in the press releases, articles, and elsewhere, being very self-focused in a way that that makes them easy for the media to use and make them heroes.

“Pull factors made the CEO attractive to the media as a story, whether or not they were trying to push themselves into the limelight, and so we found that demographically distinct CEOs—if they were someone other than a white male, essentially—then that could have an effect,” he said. “Also, strategic non-conformity is another pull factor—their firm engaged in strategic actions that were leading the companies in ways that were different than the industry’s norm.

“This makes them stand out, makes them newsworthy, and allows the media to construct stories around these behaviors that we call ‘dramatized realities,’ so the press basically tells the truth, but they tell the story in a way that’s going to make it interesting and engaging for readers.”

Journalists often paint either a CEO or a company as the hero, praising them for everything that went right, even if success was due to luck or factors out of their control.

“The press often accords CEOs responsibility for all kinds of things that one person or one company couldn’t possibly do by themselves,” Pollock said. “The CEO gets credited for all kinds of stuff that it takes a team of people within the organization and elsewhere to actually pull off, or that they may not even be responsible for, but they get credit for, because it makes a great story.

“We like to see individuals as heroes in our narratives, as especially as Americans,” he said. “So, this is the kind of thing you see happen.”