“It leaves a bitter aftertaste”: uncovering the tensions of employees’ communication engagement and impression vulnerability on social media Open Access

In recent years, communication management has intensified efforts to foster employees’ engagement in external digital environments, particularly by encouraging them to engage communicatively on social media platforms and publicly represent their organizations (e.g. Dreher, 2014; Soens and Claeys, 2021). This new expectation draws on engagement research that conceptualizes employee engagement as an internal psychological state linked to higher performance and organizational success (Bailey et al., 2017; Byrne, 2022; Macey and Schneider, 2008).

A more recent research strand highlights the communicative dimension of engagement, arguing that communication is not merely an outcome of engagement but constitutive of it (Heide and Simonsson, 2018; Taylor and Kent, 2014). This distinction becomes particularly relevant in professional social media contexts. Here, employees’ communication engagement can be understood as employees’ communicative participation, interaction and self-presentation practices on digital platforms. Through such practices, employees can assume roles such as ambassadors (Sossini and Heide, 2024) or corporate influencers (Egbert and Rudeloff, 2023), thereby contributing to organizational visibility and often being perceived as reinforcing organizational identification (Andersson et al., 2024; Christensen, 2023).

Although this new strand broadens the field, employees’ communication engagement is still frequently conceptualized as an internal state of mind that organizations can cultivate and manage communicatively (e.g. Jiang and Men, 2017; Shuck and Wollard, 2010). Such an understanding implicitly frames employees’ communication engagement as indicators of managerial effectiveness and focuses on its outcomes and behavioral change. More critical communication research, however, challenges this managerial framing and shifts attention toward employees’ communicative agency and their meaning-making processes that constitute engagement (e.g. Heide and Simonsson, 2018; Lemon, 2019). This shift has enabled the research field to move beyond a linear managerial understanding of engagement and allowed more in-depth investigation of its communicative dimension.

However, while this alternative perspective offers a new, more in-depth understanding of communication engagement, it often remains anchored in an organization-centered view, focusing primarily on the traditional employee–organization relationship (Jiang and Shen, 2023; Kang and Sung, 2017). As a result, limited attention has been paid to how meaning around employees’ communication engagement on social media develops through multiple relational contexts and conflicting discursive forces that extend beyond organizational boundaries.

Further, the prevalent organization-centrality in research on employee communication engagement on social media overlooks the networked, polycentric nature of social media, where employees navigate participatory cultures, platform architectures and multiple intersecting audiences (boyd, 2010; Hearn et al., 2018). For instance, on LinkedIn, employees engage not only with the organizational environment but also with professional communities and algorithmically generated audiences, forming relationships beyond their immediate colleagues and organization (Boyd, 2010). Platform logics (Hearn et al., 2018) and shifting career norms (Pena et al., 2022) further shape what is perceived as appropriate or desirable communication. These socio-technical and relational dynamics significantly influence how employees interpret, negotiate and enact communication engagement – often in ways beyond the scope of communication management.

Against this backdrop, this article problematizes the dominant functionalist, organization-centric view of employees’ communication engagement on social media in communication management research. Such perspectives tend to treat employees’ communication engagement as a straightforward process and indicator of managerial success or failure, while overlooking tensions and meaning conflicts that emerge in highly relational contexts such as social media. Building on a constructivist understanding of the emergence of organizational phenomena (Chia, 1995), this article calls for a perspective that acknowledges the constructed, relational and tension-filled nature of employees’ communication engagement within contemporary social media environments.

Thus, this article aims to advance our understanding of employees’ communication engagement on social media by adopting a relational, dialogical approach, supported by Relational Dialectics Theory (RDT) (Baxter and Braithwaite, 2008; Baxter and Montgomery, 1996). Rather than treating communication engagement as a stable state, this perspective conceptualizes it as a participatory communicative process shaped by competing meaning systems. Foregrounding meaning-making as a central analytical lens allows for an understanding of employees’ lived experiences and how they interpret and navigate tensions in their communicative lives on social media.

Accordingly, this article asks: What and how do competing meanings inform employees’ interpretations and enactments of communication engagement on social media?

Theoretically, the study contributes to a relational understanding of communication engagement within tension-filled social media environments. In practice, it offers organizations new insights into the limits and possibilities of employee activation on social media. Empirically, the study is based on a qualitative case study in a high-engagement context – a talent management program in a Swiss corporation. Finally, although numerous social media platforms exist, this article focuses on LinkedIn, the leading professional networking platform for self-presentation and career development (Pena et al., 2022).

Employee engagement is regarded as a desirable condition for both employees and organizations, typically grounded in psychological theory and defined as a state of involvement, identification and fulfillment (Macey and Schneider, 2008; Schaufeli, 2013). In his seminal work, organizational psychologist Kahn (1990) conceptualizes personal engagement as “self-in-role” behavior, asking how individuals bring more or less of themselves into (engagement) or remove themselves from (disengagement) their work roles. He distinguishes cognitive, affective and behavioral dimensions of engagement and emphasizes that engagement – or disengagement – is not a fixed trait but a temporary psychological state that can fluctuate over time (Kahn, 1990).

Building on this foundation, communication management began to link engagement to communication practices (Welch, 2011), seeing communication as an important management instrument to cultivate engagement and encourage proactive employee behaviors, including voicing or advocacy (e.g. Ruck and Welch, 2012; Ruck et al., 2017; Tkalac Verčič and Pološki Vokić, 2017). Within this instrumental view, communication is leveraged as a function to achieve better work engagement outcomes (Tkalac Verčič and Men, 2023).

In contrast, more recent scholarship in communication management challenges this instrumental perspective on the communication-engagement link and advances a dialogic and relational view of engagement, which also underpins this article. Taylor and Kent (2014) position communication as the core of engagement, defining it as “a two-way, relational, give-and-take between organizations and stakeholders/publics” (p. 391). This shifts the focus from managerial outcomes to engagement as something continuously constituted through communicative interaction (Jiang and Shen, 2023; Johnston and Taylor, 2018). From this communicative perspective, engagement becomes a “dynamic multidimensional relational concept featuring psychological and behavioral attributes of connection, interaction, participation, and involvement” (Johnston, 2018, p. 18). This implies that communication and engagement cannot be treated as separate constructs, but they are intertwined as mutually constitutive processes that implicate one another (Johnston and Taylor, 2018). Heide and Simonsson (2018) note, with a specific focus on employees as key actors within engagement, that “[e]ngagement is constructed in a process where the employee him- or herself acts as a communicator or dialogue partner.” (p. 209). In this sense, employees’ communication becomes both the medium and manifestation of engagement. Johnston and Lane (2021) further deepens this understanding by proposing different levels of communicative interaction, each of which constitutes engagement in various forms.

While engagement has received extensive scholarly attention, disengagement remains comparatively underexplored (Lemon and Macklin, 2021). Traditionally, seen as the negative counterpart of engagement, recent studies conceptualize disengagement as a distinct, situational phenomenon that enables employees to manage competing demands (Lemon et al., 2024; Shen and Ren, 2023). For instance, in communicative contexts such as social media, disengagement does not simply imply the absence of activity but can reflect deliberate communicative choices.

Taken together, this paper departs from the understanding that employee engagement and communicative interaction cannot be treated separately. Engagement shapes communicative participation, and communicative participation shapes engagement. This interdependence becomes particularly evident in digital contexts such as social media, where visibility, identity work and participation are inherently communicative. This reciprocity gives rise to employees’ communication engagement on social media, understood as communicative interaction on digital platforms where posting, reacting and interacting both express and construct engagement.

Finally, building on the situational nature of engagement and disengagement, this paper refers to it as a single construct, communication (dis)engagement. Rather than treating them as separate, stable or dichotomous categories, (dis)engagement highlights their interconnected and dynamic nature, in which employees may experience and enact elements of communication engagement and disengagement in the same context.

Seeing social media as a space that, through communicative interaction, constitutes engagement (Johnston and Lane, 2021), particularly LinkedIn has created new spaces in which employees can express their organizational identification (Marin and Nilă, 2021), engage with professional networks and construct a strategic online persona (Leonardi, 2014). Employees’ communication engagement on social media is often perceived as a valuable asset, as employees are perceived as highly credible communicators (van den Berg and Verhoeven, 2017), yet it also poses risks due to limited organizational control (Miles and Mangold, 2014; Opitz et al., 2018). Consequently, it is no surprise that a dominating research stream adopts a managerial focus on employee communication on social media, examining managerial perceptions of employee social media use (Pekkala et al., 2022), strategic practices (Soens and Claeys, 2021) or social media policies (Fuduric and Mandelli, 2014), aimed at steering employee communication to prevent reputational damage.

Moving beyond a managerial focus, a second research stream started to shift attention to employees’ communicative practices on social media. Scholars have shown how employees’ online voicing is shaped by audience expectations (Cassinger and Thelander, 2020) and how employees enact multivocal organizational representations on Social Media (Andersson et al., 2024). This stream has also been marked by a more critical perspective, focusing on the tension between power and empowerment (Smith et al., 2017), conflicts between personal and professional spaces (van Zoonen et al., 2016), multiple identity sources (Christensen, 2023) or broader discourses (Sossini and Heide, 2024) that discipline employees’ communication on social media.

Since social network sites connect employees to multiple audiences beyond the organization (Del Bosque, 2013), employees use social media for reasons beyond organizational advocacy. They engage in self-branding and impression-management strategies aimed at broader professional audiences (Kucharska, 2019), while simultaneously differentiating themselves from colleagues and others (Leonardi and Treem, 2012). LinkedIn, in particular, functions as both a site for organizational representation and for constructing and presenting the professional self (Marin and Nilă, 2021; Sossini and Heide, 2024). Thus, online visibility has become linked to employability, career advancement and professional opportunities (Plaisance and Piantoni, 2025; Valdez et al., 2024), increasing pressure on employees to engage in communication. However, such multiplicity introduces new complexities, requiring employees to navigate norms embedded in multiple social circles, while also adhering to platform-specific norms (boyd, 2010; Hearn et al., 2018). This navigation reflects what Papacharissi (2010) terms the networked self – a self that is fluid, relational and responsive to multiple simultaneous audiences.

Overall, while previous research has advanced the understanding of employee communication on social media, much of this work remains within a managerial or organization-centered perspective. It maps what employees do online for the organization and how organizations can guide communication and engagement but rarely examines how competing dynamics and expectations from within and beyond the organization can contrast and create tension that might foster or limit engagement. This highlights the need for a perspective that foregrounds the relational and tension-filled nature of employees’ communication on social media, in order to understand how competing meanings shape employees’ interpretations and enactments of communication (dis)engagement.

To examine relational meanings and tensions that shape employees’ communication (dis)engagement on social media, this study draws on RDT as a theoretical framework (Baxter, 2011; Baxter and Montgomery, 1996). Originally developed in interpersonal communication, the dialectics theory has increasingly been adopted in organizational communication research (Putnam et al., 2016) to examine tension-filled organizational phenomena such as change (Seo et al., 2004) or identity (Ashcraft et al., 2012). Dialectical perspectives are gaining attention in communication management and public relations research, for example in CSR communication studies (Dhanesh, 2015), particularly due to the shift towards more dialogical perspectives (Kent and Taylor, 2002), aligning with RDT. However, RDT’s potential for analyzing discursive tensions in employee communication remains underexplored.

RDT assists researchers in investigating how individuals in multiple relational contexts construct, maintain or transform meaning as they make sense of the world around them (Baxter and Braithwaite, 2008). Thus, sensemaking becomes a central concept since “it is the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 409). Thus, applying RDT involves uncovering the systems of meaning – that is discourses – embedded in people’s interpretation of their lived experiences (Baxter, 2011).

However, RDT does not treat communication as a process of consensus-building; instead, it foregrounds the interplay of competing discourses as the unit of analysis. Grounded in Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism and in a dialogical paradigm (Deetz, 2001), RDT conceptualizes meaning-making as a site of struggle between multiple, often conflicting voices. “All communication is rife with the tension-filled struggle of competing discourses – the discursive oppositions of sociality” (Baxter and Braithwaite, 2008, p. 352). Organizational communication studies similarly recognize that dialectical struggles are integral to organizational life (Fairhurst and Putnam, 2004; Putnam et al., 2016). Putnam et al. (2016) describe dialectics as “independent opposites aligned with forces that push–pull on each other like a rubber band and exist in an ongoing dynamic interplay as the poles implicate each other.” (p. 71). Thus, RDT understands meaning-making as a relational and dialogical process in which different and opposing discourses meet, fuse and differ simultaneously (Baxter and Montgomery, 1996). This aligns with Kahn’s (1990) view that engagement is marked by ambivalence and continuous movement toward and away from group membership. His description of “pushes and pulls,” (Kahn, 1990, p. 694), reflects precisely the kind of tension RDT seeks to uncover.

However, dialectic tensions rarely occur in isolation. When systems of meaning collide, they form what Baxter (2011) calls “discursive knots,” in which multiple tensions intertwine. These entanglements also suggest that discourses are not always equally balanced; some are more powerful than others (Baxter and Braithwaite, 2008; Mumby and Stohl, 1991), revealing power asymmetries embedded in communication.

In sum, RDT offers a valuable theoretical and analytical lens for uncovering the competing and often contradictory discourses that inform how employees interpret and enact communication (dis)engagement on social media.

This study draws on a qualitative research design grounded in a social constructionist onto-epistemological stance. Thus, reality and knowledge are viewed as co-constructed through interactions among human and non-human actors rather than existing independently of interpretation (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). This perspective highlights the situated and negotiated nature of meaning in specific social contexts and the discursive processes through which knowledge is created and sustained (Gergen, 1985).

To understand how employees interpret and make sense of their communication (dis)engagement on social media, particularly LinkedIn, the study uses semi-structured conversation interviews as the primary empirical material. Consistent with social constructionism, interviews are treated not as access to an objective reality but as sites of co-constructed meaning between interviewer and participant (Brinkmann and Kvale, 2015).

The study adopts a qualitative case study design to enable a rich, context-sensitive understanding of the phenomenon (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Qualitative case studies aim to uncover meaning, provide in-depth analysis of a bounded system, such as a group or organization, and exemplify the phenomenon under investigation (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016; Stake, 1995). The empirical setting for this study is a talent management program within a large Swiss corporation that supports high-potential employees through targeted career development opportunities (e.g. training and structured career planning). Admission occurs through an internal selection process that assesses applicants’ performance, developmental potential and cultural fit. While such programs typically expect and cultivate high organizational engagement and identification, this specific context functions as an extreme case: despite their strong engagement within the organization, participants exhibit unusually low levels of communication engagement on LinkedIn.

The empirical material consists of 20 semi-structured conversation interviews, which I collected between March and June 2025. The interviews were supported by photo elicitation method and a descriptive observation of interviewees’ LinkedIn profiles which I did before the interviews. To select information-rich interviewees, a purposive sampling strategy (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016; Palys, 2008) ensured the inclusion of employees who (1) had an active LinkedIn profile, and (2) were not formally obligated to represent the organization online (i.e. as ambassadors). Furthermore, the interviewees held diverse roles and tenures, which can be seen in the table below (see Table 1). The sample’s diversity should ensure a range of nuanced perspectives.

Recruitment was facilitated by an organizational representative who served as the initial point of contact with potential participants but was not involved in any other parts of the research process. Recruitment began with an internal open call for participation, followed by targeted invitations to individuals and limited snowball sampling.

The study received approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Etikprövningsmyndigheten). To ensure ethical integrity, the interviewees received a consent form that addressed anonymity, data security and their right to withdraw, as well as an information sheet that addressed the goal and scope of the research.

The interviews followed a semi-structured guide that allowed flexibility while maintaining a loose thematic structure. Interview questions ranged from generative questions (“What is your attitude towards social media?”) to more behavior questions (“How do you use LinkedIn for yourself?”) and future prediction questions (“How do you think (your) self-presentation on LinkedIn will change in the future?”) (Tracy, 2020, p. 166ff). For more grounded discussions, I conducted a descriptive observation of each participant’s LinkedIn profile before the interview. The observation focused on publicly available elements such as professional descriptions and posting activity. The notes were not treated as separate sample but served to contextualize each interview and prompt concrete examples.

Given LinkedIn’s multimodal environment, where users interact with both text and images that constitute communication practices, I also employed photo elicitation as a supplementary method to provide concrete examples and to avoid relying solely on participants’ memories. Photo Elicitation uses imagery in interviews to explore individuals’ values and beliefs about an experience (Richard and Lahman, 2015). Three LinkedIn posts were created, inspired by real posts but intentionally fictionalized to protect the original authors’ privacy. The same three posts were shown to all interview participants within the second half of the interviews. Interviewees then read the posts and shared their impressions of the content.

Theoretical saturation (Guest et al., 2006; Hennink and Kaiser, 2022) was reached after 16 interviews. Saturation was identified through the iterative process of data collection and ongoing analysis, when incoming material consistently confirmed existing themes but did not introduce new dimensions or relationships (Hennink and Kaiser, 2022). To ensure confidence and robustness in the findings, four additional interviews were conducted. After the interviews, the recordings were transcribed and cleaned of any sensitive information. The interviews lasted between 45 and 83 min, with an average of 61 min, totaling 1,214 interview minutes and 374 pages of transcripts.

The analysis of the interview transcripts examined how employees talk about and attach meaning to their and others’ communication (dis)engagement on LinkedIn. Accordingly, talk was understood as both constitutive and informed by discursive resources that shape meaning and action in online communication. Kuhn (2006) defines discursive resources as “concepts, expressions, and/or other linguistic devices that, when deployed in talk, present explanations for past and/or future activity that guide interactants’ interpretation of experience while molding individual and collective action.” (p. 1341).

Guided by this discursive approach, I conducted the analysis in two phases. In the first phase, I inductively open-coded all transcripts to identify recurring categories, discursive patterns and themes. This provided insight into how participants discussed their communication (dis)engagement and the further discursive meanings surrounding it. During this phase, emerging tensions and contradictions in participants’ statements made the relevance of RDT apparent, subsequently informing the choice of the theoretical lens. In the second phase, I adopted an abductive approach, iteratively moving between the empirical material and the theoretical lens (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2011). This involved shifting from describing “what is said” to interpreting “what it means,” using RDT, alongside concepts of communication engagement and impression management, to refine and interpret the emerging dialectical tensions.

Throughout the analysis, I engaged in ongoing self-reflexivity by examining my own assumptions, interpretive choices and positionality as a professional who also participates in LinkedIn communication. Following Tracy (2020) this meant continually questioning how personal assumptions might shape the analysis and acknowledging my role in the interpretive process. My familiarity with the field was treated not as a source of bias but as a form of productive pre-understanding (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2011) that opened dialogue with participants and the material.

This section presents and discusses the findings of the analysis. The analysis demonstrated various discursive struggles, in which opposing poles of meaning create tensions shaped by employees’ relationships not only with their organization but also with their broader professional network, and the social media platform itself. Each tension consists of two conflicting discourses that coexist in a dynamic interplay, pursuing contradicting goals and norms while implicating one another. The findings are organized into three overarching tensions (see Figure 1): (1) visibility tension, (2) representation tension and (3) boundary tension. Each tension not only brings forward contrasting goals but also generates impression management conflicts.

The first premise that emerged from the empirical material was the high value placed on the logic of visibility in the professional context. Participants described both internal and external visibility as prerequisites for gaining recognition and career advantages. As one interviewee noted: “If you want to advance your own interests, whether that means staying attractive as an employee or pushing projects you care about, you inevitably need to engage in visibility.” (N10)

However, when discussing LinkedIn specifically, participants quickly shifted from organization-related visibility to personal branding and self-presentation, resulting in significant ambivalence about how to achieve it in ways that are both beneficial to their careers but still socially acceptable. Interviewees perceive LinkedIn as a space in which maintaining professional competitiveness increasingly requires showcasing skills and achievements beyond the traditional CV. As one interviewee explained:

Similarly, another interviewee (N08) underlines personal branding as career necessity, particularly for younger professionals: “As a newcomer, you will increasingly run into limitations if you neglect personal branding on LinkedIn.” These entrepreneurial norms underlie the discourse of self-promotion that expects individuals to actively display themselves to remain employable and relevant within and beyond their current employment, reinforcing social media engagement as a marker of success (Plaisance and Piantoni, 2025)

While interviewees emphasized the importance of self-promotion online, they simultaneously also expressed critique, revealing the competing counter-discourse of modesty. For example, like other participants, interviewee (N20), who acknowledged in a previous quote the importance of active self-promotion, elaborated later in the interview: “LinkedIn has lost credibility. Some people over-promote themselves and list everything, which makes it seem ridiculous.” In a similar vein, participant N09 acknowledges the importance of self-promotion, particularly when planning to change careers, but still describes the tone on LinkedIn as “self-adoring self-congratulation”. While ambivalence and contradictions are common in interview situations, reflecting the complex nature of talk about a phenomenon (Watson, 2006), this critique goes beyond personal preference. It reflects a broader relational expectation from the professional network that disapproves of excessive self-display, since it can undermine professional credibility. Interviewee N06 explains, “When people come across as overly self-confident, I am critical and would pay very close attention to whether the person actually delivers what they promise”. Thus, the expectation to remain modest and credible stands in contrast to the expectation to proactively promote oneself, creating tension over how to achieve visibility.

Modesty was also presented as a matter of personal identity and integrity. It is tied to the individual’s self-understanding, whereby a personality trait and a state of mind are associated simultaneously (Macey and Schneider, 2008). One interviewee (N15) referred to a “bitter aftertaste” when engaging on LinkedIn, as she does not feel comfortable displaying her work. Another interviewee reflected:

Although participants acknowledged that promotional visibility may benefit their careers, excessive self-promotion was described as socially undesirable and even counterproductive, turning modesty into a professional compass that directs what feels appropriate. This also demonstrates a power imbalance between the two discourses (Baxter and Braithwaite, 2008; Mumby and Stohl, 1991). The discourse of modesty, driven by social acceptance, precedes the goal of career advancement within the self-promotion discourse, that is despite recognizing the strategic value of self-promotion online, employees feel constrained by modesty norms that define what counts as credible and socially acceptable behavior.

The consequence of this unresolved tension becomes especially visible when interviewees reflect on their disengagement, noting that it can be interpreted negatively: “People might think, ‘Why doesn’t she have a profile? Is she hiding something?’ In a world where constant information flow is expected, not being visible becomes suspicious.” (N20) Thus, both communication engagement and disengagement carry risks for one’s personal impression on others. Being visible may appear immodest or self-serving, while remaining invisible may seem unprofessional or opaque.

Taken together, the analysis shows a continuous, unresolved struggle between the discourses of promotion and modesty. Both discourses hold social and professional power, each containing relevant goals of either career advancement or social acceptability. Both are necessary to sustain valued relationships not only with the organization but also with a broader professional network. However, neither discourse can be fully prioritized without compromising one’s self-image, creating a trade-off between the risk of appearing boastful or perceived as non-ambitious.

The second dialectical tension emerged in a discursive struggle of how employees navigate different forms of representation on LinkedIn. This tension unfolds between two opposing poles: individualism and collectivism. On one side, an emphasis on creating an individual spotlight positions employees as autonomous professionals who cultivate a distinct professional persona (or personal brand). On the other side, collective affiliation frames employees as representatives of their organization. These competing systems of meaning continually and situationally pull in opposite directions, producing an ongoing struggle over who employees represent on the platform.

To begin with, the discourse on individual spotlight extends the broader entrepreneurial norms identified in the previous visibility tension, as some participants described LinkedIn as primarily a personal space for their careers, personal brands and self-presentation.

This aligns with existing research showing that personal branding and organizational representation often overlap in career-oriented self-presentation, while the underlying logic remains individualistic (Marin and Nilă, 2021; Sossini and Heide, 2024). The need to maintain independence in an uncertain labor market further reinforces the pull away from collective identity, as another interviewee elaborated: “It’s a risk to orient yourself exclusively toward one company, because you never know how things will develop” (N15). This gets further reinforced by institutional pressure coming from career coaching, as Interviewee N19 elaborates: “I’m not a fan of making posts about myself […]. But I got told by a career coach: ‘You always say we, you should also say I have done this.’ That’s something I’ve had to learn”.

At the same time, this more individualistic orientation coexists with a strong sense of responsibility and loyalty to their employer, which makes presenting one’s collective affiliation non-negligible. Throughout the interview, participants shifted from their personal branding practices to their organizational representation role, underscoring the ever-present relationship with their employer. For example, Interviewee N03 elaborates: “It is a combination of both. Since I post business-related content on LinkedIn, I have always maintained a relationship with [Employer]. Also, I’m a satisfied employee, and want to show that.”

On the question of how free employees can post online, among others, participant N08 explained: “There are limits. It must be consistent with the company’s values. The individual and organizational values do not have to overlap fully – that would be artificial – but they cannot diverge too much”. This exemplifies the pull towards collective affiliation, grounded not only in loyalty or identification but also in alignment with one’s employer’s norms. LinkedIn’s platform logic and architecture reinforce this discourse by creating a continuous, publicly visible link between employees and employers.

This inherent connection between employers and employees on LinkedIn fosters self-discipline, as participants described refraining from sharing content they would post freely on other platforms. For instance, Interviewee N01 explained that although he publishes his passion for hunting on Instagram, he avoids mentioning it on LinkedIn: “I know that hunting is a controversial topic. And people then see that I work at [Company], which then creates potential for conflict.”

Therefore, the platform acts as an additional interaction partner that strengthens the collective affiliation discourse, limiting how far employees can lean into the individual spotlight discourse. However, interviewees were also aware of the dynamics between the two discourses, reflecting on an entangled identity.

The tension of representation was also evident in the symbolism of small communicative decisions. One participant discussed an ongoing internal debate about whether to use a company-branded banner or a personal one on one’s profile.

On her LinkedIn profile, the interviewee selected the company banner, motivated by a sense of responsibility to support the organization. Thus, the banner becomes a microsite of the discursive struggle over representation, which also brings a conflict in their impression management: Choosing a personal banner would strengthen the personal brand but risked appearing overly individualistic – or as interviewee (N15) called it, “One Man or One Woman Show” – whereas adopting a corporate banner reduces differentiation.

Overall, the representation tension shows how employees’ attachment to meaning in their communication engagement on social media continuously oscillates between highlighting their professional self and aligning with their collective self. Furthermore, experiences are shaped not only by social discourses but also by platform logics, which entangle personal and organizational identities. Rather than allowing for a stable resolution, this dialectic produces ongoing negotiation between individual spotlight and organizational loyalty. However, the analysis also suggests that the discourse of corporate affiliation exerts a stronger pull, subtly yet persistently dominating the interplay between the two poles.

The third tension centers on the shifting boundary between the personal and the professional. Employees navigate two competing discursive logics: first, the growing expectation of personalized communication to enhance relatability and algorithmic visibility; and second, the enduring norm of professionalized self-presentation that defines LinkedIn’s platform image.

LinkedIn is widely understood as a space grounded in professional communication norms, shaping perceptions of appropriate, competent and credible visibility. This was echoed across interviews, where participants described the platform as oriented towards seriousness and expertise rather than personal disclosure. One interviewee explained: “LinkedIn is professional. I saw people posting family photos, and I think that’s the wrong place for that.” (N11). Another participant commented, “When private and work life get mixed, like: ‘I built Lego with my son, and these are the five leadership lessons I learned from it.’ [ironic tone]. It seems questionable and forced.” (N16)

Simultaneously, an increasingly influential discourse of personalization guides employees to disclose vulnerability, emotions and aspects of their personal lives to appear more authentic and relatable. One interviewee noted: “Once something is online, it’s online – you must keep that in mind. But I think showing vulnerability is not a bad thing. Most people present themselves as perfect online, and that’s unrealistic” (N18). Here, vulnerability is framed as a counteraction to the polished ideal of professional perfectionism, while also raising concerns about reputational risk. However, both meanings create a dynamic interplay that fosters ambivalence about the boundaries between personal and professional social media communication.

The boundary tension is further amplified by the platform’s algorithmic logic, which appears to reward personal content. Several interviewees described how LinkedIn promotes faces, personal stories and emotional disclosure. As one interviewee elaborated:

The interviewees’ knowledge about the algorithmic logic strengthens the personalization discourse, while, as seen in the excerpt, it creates a conflict in the employees’ self-understanding.

While this dynamic creates an internal dilemma, it also creates an external dilemma with how others perceive them. For example, interviewee N03 noted that “If the private sphere spills over too much, then the perception of the person’s professional image also changes”. Here, the tension becomes an impression-management problem: leaning too far into personalization risks undermining one’s competency, while resisting it may reduce algorithmic visibility. One interviewee also connects this with an increasing discomfort with the growing “Instagramification” of LinkedIn:

For others, the boundary tension is a situational negotiation. For instance, interviewee N19, at the beginning of the interview, also criticized the rise of personal content: “I find it unfortunate that the content moves away more and more from this business context.” However, during the interview, he revised his own stance. Reflecting aloud, he concluded that greater vulnerability aligns with broader professional shifts:

This reflexive shift illustrates how employees navigate and reinterpret competing meanings and their relationships to broader cultural and societal shifts, rather than simply choosing between them.

Altogether, the boundary tension showcases that the tension between personal and professional emerges not as a fixed line but as a relational site of ongoing negotiation among discursive expectations, platform incentives and one’s self-understanding. Employees continuously remake meaning as they decide how far to lean into personalization for the algorithm without undermining the professionalism that LinkedIn demands. In this process, they navigate an emerging impression-management conflict that poses a double-edged risk: appearing either too personal or too professional, both of which can undermine their professional credibility.

This article examined the competing meanings embedded in employees’ social media communication and asked how they inform employees’ communication (dis)engagement. The analysis shows that employees’ communication (dis)engagement is a nuanced and tension-filled process, shaped by simultaneous pulls between organizational expectations, professional norms, platform logics and one’s self-understanding. By foregrounding the relational dynamics of these discursive knots (Baxter, 2011), the study identifies three tensions that shape employees’ meaning-making and practices.

The visibility tension hinges on the competing poles of promotion (exposing oneself to advance career ambitions) and modesty (remaining silent to maintain social acceptance). Each pole implies the other, determining what counts as excessive or appropriate. Out of this tension, a new meaning emerges, rendering social media communication as cautiously performative, implying awareness of being seen while still worrying about overexposure. The representation tension arises from conflicting meanings between highlighting individual accomplishments and demonstrating collective affiliation, which signals organizational identification. The interplay between the two poles yields what can be described as relational voicing, which must satisfy both individual and organizational expectations. Finally, the boundary tension pits the poles of personalization and professionalism against each other. Both are reinforced by platform logics that reward personalized content while still expecting professionalism. This tension produces a new meaning of curated credibility, in which employees strive to appear genuine while adhering to professional and organizational norms.

Across tensions, it becomes evident that neither discourse can be fully prioritized without compromising one’s desired self-image. Employees are caught between appearing boastful or unambitious, too individualistic or insufficiently distinct, too personal or overly formal. Drawing on impression management scholarship, this condition is conceptualized as impression vulnerability: an emergent state in which any communicative choice risks misalignment with at least one relational expectation. Impression vulnerability is a central dilemma in employees’ communication engagement on social media, which can culminate in disengagement as employees situationally withdraw to protect their professional self-image.

The findings capture the ambivalence underlying the meaning of employees’ communication (dis)engagement on social media. Recognizing this not as an individual shortcoming but as a product of competing meaning systems and tension provides a foundation for reassessing how employees’ communication (dis)engagement on social media is theorized.

This article makes three theoretical contributions beyond the immediate findings: First, the study advances communication management research by conceptualizing employees’ communication engagement on social media as a relational dialectical process, rather than a behavioral outcome or reflection of managerial effectiveness. Whereas prior research often treats communication engagement on social media as a stable, desirable state (e.g. Dreher, 2014; Opitz et al., 2018; Soens and Claeys, 2021), this study shows that employees’ communication (dis)engagement on social media emerges from their ongoing interpretive negotiation between contradictory systems of meaning. This reinforces the multidimensional and relational nature of communication engagement (Johnston and Taylor, 2018), which becomes even more complex in social media environments where numerous discourses surrounding employees’ communication engagement intersect and compete. In doing so, the study foregrounds the value of dialectical perspectives (Baxter and Braithwaite, 2008; Putnam et al., 2016) such as RDT within communication management research, by illustrating its potential to illuminate discursive tension and polyvocality in employee communication on social media, showcasing that meaning-making rests on tension rather than coherence.

Second, the study contributes to a more socio-technical understanding, highlighting the social media platform itself as an active relational force in meaning-making, rather than just a tool to drive engagement (e.g. Men et al., 2020; Ruck and Welch, 2012). Platform logics, for example algorithmic visibility or digital architecture, shape how employees interpret risks and opportunities in and around their communication engagement. This shifts theoretical attention beyond the employee-organization relationship to include the platform and its imagined audiences as co-constructors of communication (dis)engagement, revealing how digital platforms inform it in ways that organizations cannot fully control.

Third, the study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the connection between identification and employees’ communication behavior. It shows the multitude of identification processes that move beyond traditional organizational identification (Ashforth et al., 2020; Christensen, 2023) by considering additional identity processes rooted in employees’ self-understanding and broader professional identity norms. The concept of impression vulnerabilities, based on impression-management conflicts, shows how employees’ self-presentation not only intersects with traditional organizational identification but also platform identity and personal self-concept, producing ambivalence and reputational concerns.

Overall, this article contributes to a more critical and relational theorizing of employees’ communication (dis)engagement on social media. By situating communication engagement within the broader relational and discursive ecology of social media communication, where organizational, professional, platform and cultural meanings intersect, this study moves beyond managerial and organization-centric perspectives. It offers a pluralistic account of how employees’ communication (dis)engagement is discursively and relationally constituted.

The findings call for greater managerial sensitivity to the discursive struggles employees face in their social media communication. Employees communicate within multiple relational contexts on social media, including peers and algorithmically generated audiences. These overlapping audiences can create uncertainty, leading to selective participation or withdrawal. Managers should thus refrain from equating low communicative activity with managerial failure but instead recognize how extra-organizational meaning systems shape employees’ decisions about when and how to communicate.

Further, managers should be cautious in positioning LinkedIn as the default channel for employee communication in the digital sphere. Platform-specific norms, such as expectations for strategic visibility or self-promotion, may conflict with employees’ professional values and comfort with public exposure. When employees reduce their level of communication engagement, the appropriate response is not necessarily to intensify ambassador initiatives, but to reflect on whether the platform aligns with employees’ values.

Finally, the study underscores the importance of respecting employees’ personal autonomy in their professional self-understanding. Rather than focusing solely on organizational identification, managers should recognize the role of impression management in shaping communication engagement. Since engaging on professional social platforms requires ongoing negotiation of one’s public persona, acknowledging the interpretive and emotional effort involved (i.e. invisible work) and the differing boundaries across individuals can help establish more realistic expectations around voluntary engagement and encourage a more supportive communication climate.

While this study provides valuable insights into the tensions informing employees’ communication engagement on social media, several limitations should be acknowledged. First, the research is based on a qualitative case study conducted within a talent management program, which represents a specific organizational setting. Although this offers rich, situated insights into participants’ lived experiences, future studies could explore other organizational environments or cultural contexts. Comparative research, particularly across more collectivistic cultures, may further illuminate how different norms and discursive environments shape communication (dis)engagement. Second, the study focused specifically on LinkedIn because of its relevance to professional social media practices. Expanding future research to other digital platforms of self-presentation could reveal alternative communication dynamics. Finally, while this study initiated a discussion on platforms’ influence on employees’ communication engagement, it did not examine platform logics in detail. Alternative approaches, such as digital ethnography or observations of everyday platform interaction, could deepen understanding of how technology co-constitutes communicative engagement.