Leveraging the enterprise social network for the emergence of women's leadership

This paper draws on social role theory and role congruity theory to argue that Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) are conductive environments to the emergence and the recognition of women’s (informal) leadership in organizations. The majority of the literature about the organizational effects of ESNs has stressed their importance for social capital formation, cooperation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, creativity and innovation among employees. However, this literature has almost neglected to explore the relationships between the use of online ESNs, informal leadership, and gender network. By filling this gap, our study reports the preliminary findings of an empirical analysis that was conducted on an ESN and it suggests a new research agenda to be devoted to gender issues in ESNs.