The Impact of Twitter Users' Characteristics on Behaviors

Abstract

Researchers have focused on leadership, often overlooking followership. The notion of followership was irreversibly transformed with the advent and societal adoption of followership systems, such as Twitter. To examine such emergent systems, this paper advances a distinct form of followership: eFollowership. To understand Twitter and its users, the eFollowership concept is explicated and synthesized by adapting several followership lenses from the literature. The authors empirically examined eFollowership by assessing the roles constructed by 301 Twitter users and the relationships between these users' role-based characteristics and behaviors with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Results showed that users' voicing and empowering behaviors were significantly influenced by users' characteristics: personal sense of power, eCourage, and social capital. Users' helping behaviors were related to users' personal sense of power and social capital, but not to eCourage. Surprisingly, users' disempowering behaviors were unrelated to all three users' characteristics.