BRIDGING EXPECTATIONS: BIDIRECTIONAL FRAMING FOR NAVIGATING LEGITIMACY TENSION

Large organizations increasingly attempt to encourage employees to participate in their strategy making processes and availability of technology-mediated forms of collaboration creates more opportunities for realizing this objective. In this study we investigate how organizers of an internal online community navigate the legitimacy tensions emerging from the different evaluation criteria of the two stakeholder groups: senior managers and community members. From our analysis, we derive a theoretical framework centered on bridging mechanisms that secure support by community stakeholders. This framework posits that the divergent interests and expectations of the two stakeholder groups can be harmonized through a combination of bidirectional framing and hidden structuring mechanisms.