Reactions to CEO’s strategy discourse:A case study

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate the constitutive effects of CEO’s strategy discourse as shown by reactions of recipients to the discourse. The case study is on the reactions of recipients to the discourses of the bank’s CEO, who announced the year ‘2020 Vision’ along with strategy to transform traditional banking to digital banking. The premise that discourse is a process that represents and relates to other social elements is drawn upon Fairclough’s (2003) notion. The search for the CEO’s discourses was conducted through the search engine on key words (the bank’s name with additional words such as future vision or staff layoff) and related documents. The study analyses discourses at an organizational level in terms of the consistency among discourses and the alignment of discourses with context. The findings show that the CEO’s strategy discourses can be identified into discourse of organization, discourse of change, and discourse of future, and that the perceived incongruence of discourses, as indicated by the inconsistency among discourses and a misfit of discourses and organizational context, induced unintended interpretations and negative reactions from recipients. Research implication is that the relations among leaders’ strategy discourses as well as the relations between leaders’ discourse and context can be studied to determine the reactions of recipients. Practical implication is that leaders need to be effective sense-givers for recipients to facilitate the emergence of new shared, intended meanings that support strategic change.