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2025 AOM Annual Meeting

ONE

Session: 25664: Greenfluencing and the Role of Chief Sustainability Officers in Corporate Climate Action

23945: Corporate Greenfluencing? Understanding STOXX® Europe 600 Chief Sustainability Officers on LinkedIn (session 25664)

Monday, July 28, 2025

10:15 - 11:45 CEST (GMT+2)

Location: Bella Center: Hall B- B0-m4

Session Type: Paper Session
Shareable link: https://cdmcd.co/5npM3R

Author(s)

MM

Marius Mölders

HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
MK

Martin Keiper

HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
MR

Manuel Reppmann

U. of Hamburg, Germany
FM

Frederik Maibaum

University of Münster, Germany
HZ

Henning Zülch

HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management

Large corporations are increasingly appointing Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) to drive corporate sustainability (CS) transformation. In doing so, CSOs potentially act as social change agents and executive public voices to engage with stakeholders in the context of sustainability. However, prior research remains silent on how CSOs communicate externally and what fuels corresponding stakeholder engagement. In response, in this study we analyze 10,585 LinkedIn posts by CSOs of STOXX® Europe 600 companies to shed light on their CS communication. For this purpose, we use natural language processing (NLP) to train a bi-term topic model that allows us to decode und understand the topics that CSOs talk about on social media. In a second step, we investigate what drives stakeholder reactions on LinkedIn to shed light on how CSOs attempt to create stakeholder engagement on social media. In doing so, our study contributes to contemporary research on CS and environmental communication by conceptualizing CSOs as an emerging C-level executive role dedicated to CS.

view paper (if available)