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This study investigates online corporate opinion leadership on professional social media from two different perspectives: first, how corporate opinion leadership indicated by corporate followers is related to company revenue and second, what are the drivers and mediators of corporate opinion leadership?

The authors randomly selected more than 300 companies with active profiles on LinkedIn from the S&P 500 list and then collected data on corporate followers as an indicator of corporate opinion leadership and revenue during a year. Moreover, the authors collected daily information on content generated by companies, users, and employees such as job posts, users' reactions to posts, and employee profiles during a 44-day period, which allowed the authors to apply panel estimation techniques to estimate the determinants of corporate opinion leadership.

The estimation results reveal that corporate opinion leadership and business revenue are positively and significantly correlated. Furthermore, after controlling for firm fixed effects and endogeneity, the authors show that corporate, user and employee-generated content (mediated by groups and skills) have a significant impact on corporate opinion leadership.

Individual online opinion leaders are currently paying considerable attention to practitioners. However, professional networking platforms have also created an opportunity to establish corporate opinion leaders who may play an important role in business. The study provides useful and practical insights on the activities that companies can undertake to develop corporate opinion leadership.

This study seeks to expand previous research on opinion leadership with a focus on the corporate dimension, which is increasingly visible on professional networking platforms. Contrary to former research that collected data on perceived opinion leadership, the authors obtained data directly from LinkedIn. Moreover, the authors contribute to signaling and social identity theories by exploring how professional networking platforms constitute an environment for signaling and developing multiple professional identities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the use of social media can facilitate employee creativity. Departing from theories on social capital and knowledge management, this study examines the relationship among individual characteristics, the use of social technologies and employee creativity. The main hypothesis of the study is that online social networking mediates the relationship between personal innovativeness and creativity.

Data were obtained through an online survey of 80 engineers and 12 managers working in a large IT company listed by the Fortune 500 (n1=80, n2=12). The empirical strategy relies on fixed-effects structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis with a quasi-experimental design to study the structural relationship among creativity, online social connectivity (OSC) and personal innovativeness.

The study provides three major findings. First, the results show that personal innovativeness regarding new technologies is positively associated with creativity. Second, 18 percent of the association between personal innovativeness and creativity is explained by the latent mediator OSC (a construct of online networking and knowledge management). More specifically, the partial mediation is driven by online networking, specifically establishing new connections. Finally, contrary to the expectations, there is no significant evidence that the relationship between creativity and personal innovativeness is mediated by online social knowledge management.

Understanding the ways in which online connections and online knowledge management as well as personal innovativeness are related to employee creativity helps in building innovative organizations. This study may facilitate recruitment and selection strategies and encourage organizations to implement platforms with user-friendly functionalities of connecting with other employees and searching data.

The main question of this study is whether all features related to social technologies make people more creative. Evidence is still scarce, but there are hints that creativity is not only an innate personal feature but also a social phenomenon. This study explains the benefits of OSC for enhancing employee creativity.

The present article analyses the effects of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBM&As) on targets' total factor productivity (TFP), employment, wages and intangible-asset investment. The author investigates whether the impact of CBM&As differs depending on the origin of the investing multinational (MNE). The author distinguishes between CBM&As from European countries, other developed countries and emerging countries.

The author makes use of a unique firm-level data set of foreign direct investment in the French manufacturing sector. The authors applies propensity score matching and difference in differences to estimate the effect of CBM&As.

The results show that the consequences of CBM&As differ strongly depending on the origin. CBM&As from European MNEs have a positive impact on TFP, wages and intangible-asset investment, and those from emerging countries seem to increase wages and intangible-asset investments. In contrast, CBM&As that originate from MNEs from other developed countries do not have a significant effect.

This article contributes to the growing literature on the effects of foreign direct investment that highlights the relevance of accounting for the MNEs' origin. In particular, it is the first to address the impact of emerging-country MNEs' CBM&As in Europe.