“None of Us Wanted to be at This Party, But What a Guest List”: How Technology Workers Position Themselves on LinkedIn Following Layoffs

Abstract

Mass layoffs offer a unique and understudied context to understand how affected workers communicate the involuntary, collective nature of their organizational exit. In this study, we explored the communicative strategies that workers affected by mass layoffs in the technology industry used to engage in impression management by analyzing LinkedIn posts ( N = 362). Our findings showed that workers engaged in proactive impression management by drawing on targets of identification (such as positioning themselves within the collective group of affected workers and highlighting their former membership with prestigious companies) to minimize blame for their layoff and signal their employability. Our findings also suggest that, amid environmental shock and in digital environments, individuals enact remarkably similar communicative strategies to one another, suggesting that this type of organizational exit announcement is a distinct emergent genre for impression management. We discuss our findings’ implications for our understanding of organizational exit and work-related online impression management behavior.