Responding to Negative Social Media Content: an Organizational Identification Perspective

Social media has transformed communication between organizations and their stakeholders. As organizations are trying to manage their identity and reputation without having full control over organization-related on-line content, the role of individual stakeholders in responding to online criticism about the organization becomes more important. Building on the organizational identification literature, this study examines the role of organizational identification in motivating stakeholder responses to organization-directed criticism on social media. The proposed research model hypothesizes a positive relationship between organizational identification and organizational members’ propensity to respond to negative organization-related content in an adversarial manner. Organizational identity orientation is proposed to moderate such relationship. It is proposed that the model will be tested using survey data.