Leaders In Extreme Contexts: An Exploratory Analysis Of Us Leaders' Tweets Completed Research

In the midst of extreme events, leaders champion their followers' cause and are anticipated to provide direction, guidance, and hope. Oftentimes, leaders take social media to communicate with their followers. To better understand the dynamics of leader social media rhetoric during extreme events, we adopt a language expectancy theory perspective to examine tweets sent by political leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Language expectancy theory postulates that social and artificially contrived groups (e.g., gender, race) have different quarterlies of acceptable dialogue. Our research is novel in exploring the way in which exogenous shocks shift acceptable language boundaries for groups such as political orientation, race, gender, age, etc. We present an exploratory analysis of over 350,000 U.S. political leader tweets spanning eight months between November 2019 and June 2020. Our findings springboard both leadership communication and extreme event research within the field of information systems.