The Emergence of Online Community Leadership

Steven L. Johnson (), Hani Safadi () and Samer Faraj ()
Additional contact information
Steven L. Johnson: Fox School of Business, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
Hani Safadi: Howe School of Technology Management, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030
Samer Faraj: Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montréal, Québec H3A 1G5, Canada

Information Systems Research, 2015, vol. 26, issue 1, 165-187

Abstract: Compared to traditional organizations, online community leadership processes and how leaders emerge are not well studied. Previous studies of online leadership have often identified leaders as those who administer forums or have high network centrality scores. Although communication in online communities occurs almost exclusively through written words, little research has addressed how the comparative use of language shapes community dynamics. Using participant surveys to identify leading online community members, this study analyzes a year of communication network history and message content to assess whether language use differentiates leaders from other core community participants. We contribute a novel use of textual analysis to develop a model of language use to evaluate the utterances of all participants in the community. We find that beyond communication network position—in terms of formal role, centrality, membership in the core, and boundary spanning—those viewed as leaders by other participants, post a large number of positive, concise posts with simple language familiar to other participants. This research provides a model to study online language use and points to the emergent and shared nature of online community leadership.

Keywords: online communities; leadership; natural language processing; knowledge management; network analysis; computer-mediated communication and collaboration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2014.0562 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orisre:v:26:y:2015:i:1:p:165-187

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Information Systems Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().