How does social media affect entrepreneurial leadership : A qualitative study on entrepreneur’s perceptions regarding social media as a tool for entrepreneurial leadership

This thesis is about entrepreneurial leadership and how entrepreneurs are affected by social media. Our aim with this study is to investigate how social media affects entrepreneurial leadership. One of the main questions we are trying to figure out is, can social media be used as a tool for entrepreneurial leadership and if that is the case, how? To be able to answer the aim, the thesis takes a qualitative researched approach, we conducted individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs. The data from the interviews will be analysed using grounded theory coding with the approach of finding 1st order concepts to look for patterns in the data. The 1st order concepts led us to the 2nd ordered themes, which became three aggregated dimensions; cast expander, leadership enhancer and new social context. The result gave us a deeper understanding of entrepreneurial leadership and how the entrepreneurial leader perceives social media as a leadership tool. By combining our three aggregate dimensions, cast expander, leadership enhancer and new social context we were able to build a model of how these three dimensions intersect. What makes this model useful is that it gives us some insight into how social media affects entrepreneurial leadershi