Proceedings | Finance area | Year 2019 | |
Reactions to CEO's strategy discourse: A case studyby Duangporn Arbhasil | |
the 3rd International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences in
Berlin, Germany 29-31 August 2019 |
AbstractThe 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
Keywords: strategy discourse, CEO, reactions, consistency, alignment |