This paper investigates effects of strategic transparency on enterprise social media on employee’s strategy work. While strategic transparency is widely regarded as beneficial for improved strategy understanding, it can also generate adverse effects, such as information overload. Drawing on a single case study of an industrial manufacturing company that implemented an enterprise social media platform, we analyze the effect of strategic transparency based on 131 employee interviews and extant secondary data. We identify four types of overload (content, technological, competence, and boundary overload), triggering particular coping practices (tailored filtering, routinized usage times, maintaining anonymity, and ignoring information). These practices mitigate experiences of overload, yet counterintuitively do not result in a loss or detachment from strategic information. Rather, these responses, lead to positive effects, such as increased individual awareness of strategy and increased collective understanding of strategy. We argue that this results in a general increase of strategic mindfulness among employees. This study contributes to the literatures on information overload, strategy-as-practice, and open strategy, by offering nuanced insights into how employees deal with information overload and how this improves employees’ involvement into strategy.
