CEOs shape public discourse on climate change through their social media communication, and their posts signal strategic priorities to customers, employees, investors, and policymakers alike. Yet it has remained unclear how the language CEOs choose affects the effectiveness of their climate-related messages.
Drawing on schema-congruity theory and leader role expectations, the article conceptualizes certainty in language as congruent and anxiety as incongruent CEO language. The authors combine an automated text analysis of 5,544 posts on X by 50 CEOs of Global Fortune 500 companies with a scenario-based follow-up experiment (N = 119) that examines strategically relevant downstream effects such as company-related word of mouth and willingness to invest in the CEO's company.
The results show that congruent language (i.e., certainty) generally increases public engagement, while incongruent language (i.e., anxiety) reduces it. In climate-related posts, however, anxiety can become congruent and exert positive effects, which underscores the critical role of content. Attention emerges as the psychological mechanism linking (in)congruent CEO communication to engagement and to outcomes beyond the platform.
The study contributes to research on the strategic use of CEO social media communication, on schema-(in)congruity in digital communication, and on corporate climate communication by identifying climate-related content as a boundary condition of congruity effects and by offering concrete guidance for effective sustainability messaging.
The article is published open access in Business Strategy and the Environment and can be accessed here.
