Exploring leadership in Facebook communities: personality traits and activities

Abstract

Leaders of online communities are today becoming key players in social media sites like Facebook. Responsible for the community's participation rules, limits and members' identities, these leaders represent an important population on which to focus. This paper compares 94 Facebook community leaders to 94 other Internet users (N=188) in order to identify differences among them with respect to five major personality traits ("the BIG 5") as well as their online and offline activities. The results of the online surveys show that Facebook community leaders are more extroverted, open to experience, emotionally stable and active online and offline than are other Internet users. Examining the community categories, the leaders who manage Facebook support communities were found to be more introverted and less active online than leaders of other community types. The results are discussed in the context of the unique role of online leadership in the social media environment.

Key motivations for leading Facebook communities: a uses and gratifications approach

“…They also function as centralized gatekeepers, filtering online chatter and leading the discussion in a certain direction (Al-Rawi, 2019); they are the ones responsible for the information flow and community boundaries (Johnson et al , 2015). They are significantly different from other Facebook users in their personal characteristics as well as in their level of offline and online activities, which are higher than other users (Gazit, 2021). Thus, they have an enormous influence on the community's sustainability over time, and their impact is found to extend across discussion entities, resulting in communication homogeneity and leading to significant network effects that have an impact on participants' interactions (Lee et al , 2019).…”

“…The basic assumption of the UGT approach is that people use media to gratify their needs. It was already found that the leaders are different in their personalities and level of activities from other users (Gazit, 2021). This study found that they also have unique motivations to create communities as a way to fulfill: informational needs, such as exchanging information, establishing a new virtual domain and creating a virtual space with “clean” interests; social needs, including having a community, and getting and giving support; and individual interests, such as loving the domain of the community, establishing themselves as authorities and arising from personal experience.…”

“…While openness to experience and consciousness are known as important personality traits for leaders in general (Deinert et al , 2015), these traits are probably less effective with respect to Facebook community leaders' motivations to lead. Indeed, a recent study found no difference between Facebook community leaders and other users in the consciousness personality trait and explain this finding by the notion that the virtual environment does not necessarily need leaders to demonstrate attributes like being careful (Gazit, 2021).…”

“…This study aims to explore Facebook community leaders' motivations. As the leaders of those communities are usually not professionals or formally selected by other community members (Gazit, 2021; Paskewitz and Beck, 2018), leadership endorsement and effectiveness are increasingly based on whether the users' actions in the network are capable of affecting the actions of many other users in the network (Riquelme and González-Cantergiani, 2016). The leaders' personality characteristics may be crucial to their motivations.…”

“…One study, examining WhatsApp groups, found that the managers of the groups were more open to experience than other group members (Gazit and Aharony, 2018). A recent study found that leaders of Facebook communities are more extroverted, open to experience and emotionally stable than other community members (Gazit, 2021). However, no prior research, as far as can be determined, has examined the relationships between Facebook community leaders' personalities and their motivations according to the UGT theory.…”