The Russian attack on Ukraine also poses enormous challenges for top managers in their communication.

Not only companies doing business in Russia and Ukraine get caught between the fronts, because war and sanctions affect the entire economy and worry shareholders and customers.

Scientific studies show that statements by CEOs on political, ecological or social issues can influence public opinion and customer behavior both positively and negatively.

Stock prices are generally sensitive to comments from CEOs, and socio-political activism can hurt company value.

Posture is always associated with risks.

Their costs can be significantly higher for companies than their benefits.


Since the beginning of the war, the mood in social networks has been heated.

A clear stance is demanded, the understanding of "business as usual" is often poor.

Employees, customers and other stakeholders increasingly expect top managers with the appropriate power and reach to act as role models and provide moral guidance.

How do top managers deal with this tension in their public communication regarding the Ukraine war?

In order to answer this question, I evaluated the communication of all board members of the 40 Dax companies on the LinkedIn social network in a current study.

Since previous studies are often limited to CEOs, I deliberately looked at all board members of the DAX companies in order to draw as broad a picture as possible.

To anticipate the answer: A certain ambivalence in dealing with the war is also evident among the board members on Linkedin.

A balance between clear positioning and "business as usual" understandably seems difficult.

Only ten managers explicitly name Russia as an aggressor

Linkedin is an important communication channel for board members.

Not only the CEOs, but board members in general are widely represented on Linkedin.

Of the 247 Dax 40 board members, 185, i.e. almost 75 percent, have a publicly accessible profile.

There are a little fewer, if you only look at the 41 CEOs (Zalando has dual leadership), of whom 29 (71 percent) have a corresponding Linkedin profile.

About 65 percent of all profiles are active profiles within the meaning of this study, which means that at least one post was published between mid-December 2021 and mid-March 2022 and there were comments and likes since the beginning of the war on February 24, 2022.

On average, nine posts were posted on the profiles in the three months under review.

If you only look at the CEOs, there were 16 posts.

Board members have an average of 11,142 followers.

What is striking, however, is a very wide range from 37 to 255,250 followers, so that the median is 3291 followers.

This can also be explained by the above-average performance of CEOs.

The average CEO on Linkedin has 40,452 followers.

With 4392 followers, other board members only have an average of a tenth of that.

The ten board members with the most followers include Hildegard Wortmann, the sales director at Volkswagen, and Merck boss Belén Garijo, i.e. two women.