Resumo

Today, social media platforms give celebrities the possibility of generating content and directly interacting with their audience. CEOs that develop their celebrity persona can further strengthen their power to influence others and exercise their leadership. At the same time, humility is a desired trait performed by celebrity CEOs' on social media, usually related to motivational speeches. However, literature connecting leadership and social media is still sparse, and to our knowledge, no work has established a link between humility and celebrity from CEOs' online footprint.

How humility is reproduced within a celebrity CEO’s discourse? We propose that humility can be employed as a relevant aspect of a celebrity CEO’s discourse. We aim to analyze the construction of a discourse on a leader's social media, and what is the role of humility within it.

CEO’s celebrity is usually attained by journalists, but with social media, CEOs have the power to construct their own strategies in a way to put themselves on pedestals (Lovelace et al., 2018). Humility can be considered a value that reaches back to Ancient Greeks. It is a “forgetting of the self”, “the ability to see the worthiness of others”, and “a disposition to choose well” (Sadler-Smith & Akstinaite, 2021). To study CEO celebrity, Lovelace et al. (2018) proposed an analytical framework based on dramaturgy. They argue that there must be conflicts and challenges for a CEO to overcome.

The proposed method comes from the political discourse analysis applied on social media. 130 posts corresponding to the last two years of feed publications of our subject were collected and coded. The final analysis ended up with three categories of antagonists (traditional financial system, barriers, and ant-consumption behavior), and another eight themes connected to the protagonist (discourse values, organization actions, country actions, the ideal entrepreneur, the good capitalism, celebrity, scenery, discourse manifestation).

Our subject fits Lovelace et al. (2018) creator and transformer archetypes, depending on the moment. Posts show a humble beginning, and the discourse relates humility with meritocracy, persistence, and ambition. Humility can be seen as a style that values the founder’s own figure as someone humble and wise. It is also possible to identify antagonisms and silence – especially when analyzing what is not shown or said.

Reviewing the literature about celebrity CEOs and humility in leadership, it's possible to see that there is an adaptation through time and technologies that lead to what we see today as a representative of leadership. In an era of digital relationships, it’s not only the interactions of members inside the company that counts but also the connection with the whole public. Even more, the collected data shows that leaders can use positive characteristics such as humility to get closer to their followers and interact with them, which can affect public perception of the leader and the company.

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