E-Leadership or “How to Be Boss in Instant Messaging?” The Role of Nonverbal Communication

Abstract

Doing leadership in the virtual realm has now become a routine part of many leaders’ daily work, yet our understanding of how leadership is enacted in mediated contexts—especially in text-only channels—is very limited. By applying micro-level analysis to naturally occurring instant message conversations, this article exposes the strategies leaders employ to achieve a range of complex communication goals: to get the work done while fostering informality and collegiality and creating the sense of a real—and not virtual—collaboration between team members. The findings further our understanding in two domains: They provide empirical grounding for e-leadership theories by exposing practices from real-life interactions, and they contribute to discursive leadership literature by addressing nonverbal communication practices. The findings of the article could form the basis for management and leadership training by drawing attention to the linguistic and semiotic resources digital leaders have at their disposal in virtual work environments.

A Bot and a Smile: Interpersonal Impressions of Chatbots and Humans Using Emoji in Computer-mediated Communication

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Critical Language and Discourse Awareness in Management Education

“…Take, for instance, the following conversation that takes place via instant messaging (IM) between two colleagues who are in geographically distant locations (adapted from Darics, 2017). Fabiana is Andrew's boss, the regional lead of the team, and, in this conversation fragment, she is enquiring about who is going to take the minutes at their next meeting:…”

Translanguaging and multimodality in workplace texts and writing

“…Previous research has examined workplace writing and literacy, language choice and multilingualism in writing (Angouri & Miglbauer, 2014;Incelli, 2013;Kankaanranta, 2006), revealing how writers target texts to different audiences (Brown & Herndl, 1986;McNely, 2019), and the role of digital media (Darics, 2017;Golden & Geisler, 2007). However, research has tended to focus on either texts as artifacts, or on meetings and oral communication, thus disregarding the role of texts as embedded in meetings and communication.…”