Reactions to the CEO’S strategy discourses: A case study

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate the constitutive effects of the CEO’s strategy discourses as shown by the reactions of recipients. The discourses of the CEO of one large Thai commercial bank (“Sunny Bank” is used as a pseudonym) about “2020 Vision” and its strategy to transform to a digital bank received wide attention from the public and media due to the announced huge reduction of 12,000 employees and closure of more than 700 branches for the three-year period 2018-2020. The study’s underlying premise is that discourse as a process represents shared meanings and relates to or connects with other social elements. The study consists of media texts and company media releases within six months after the announcement event (January 22, 2018). The results of a keyword search of the internet provide the relevant news articles. The interpretive approach was used to identify salient organizational-level discourses and the study analysed consistency among discourses and the alignment of discourses with context. The findings show that the CEO’s strategy discourses can be identified as discourse of structural change, discourse of strategic change, and discourse of the future, and that the perceived incongruence in these strategy discourses, as indicated by inconsistency among discourses and a misfit of discourses and organizational context, induced unintended interpretations and some negative reactions from the recipients. Research implication is that the relations among leaders’ strategy discourses as well as the relations between leaders’ discourses and context can be studied to determine the reactions of recipients. Practical implication is that leaders need to be effective sensegivers for recipients to facilitate the emergence of new shared, intended meanings that support strategic change. The study contributes to better understandings of discourses as a process that constitutes relations which can be managed by leaders to influence the responses of audiences.