Exploring another side of co-leadership: Negotiating professional identities through face-work in disagreements

Abstract

Traditional perceptions that view leadership as a top-down process are increasingly challenged by so-called critical perspectives that acknowledge that leadership may involve several people. This article explores a particular type of these other leadership constellations, namely co-leadership where members share several leadership responsibilities.Drawing on more than twenty hours of authentic discourse data recorded in two workplaces in Hong Kong, we employ the analytical concepts of face and identity to identify and describe some of the complex processes through which co-leadership is enacted. Our particular focus is situations in which members of the co-leadership team disagree with each other.Our findings indicate that co-leadership is a dynamic process in which both members position themselves and each other as leader and co-leader at different moments throughout an interaction. This dynamic nature can be captured particularly well by exploring how face-work and identity construction are accomplished in interlocutors' everyday workplace talk. (Co-leadership, identity, face, workplace discourse, Hong Kong)*

Exploring distributed leadership: Solving disagreements and negotiating consensus in a ‘leaderless’ team

“…Some of the more common discourse strategies that interlocutors regularly draw on when uttering strong disagreements include interruption, louder voice, talking faster than usually, and the use of the disagreement token no, while weak disagreements often involve silence, hedges and some kind of repair initiation (see also Schnurr & Chan 2011). As our analysis below shows, disagreements are often constructed and negotiated among interlocutors over several turns and in many cases several of these disagreement strategies are used in combination.…”

“…Shifting the analytical focus away from individuals towards other leadership constellations is likely to assist us in identifying and understanding some of the specific processes through which leadership is actually done. There is an urgent need to explore more of these other, nontraditional leadership constellations, such as distributed leadership and co-leadership (see Schnurr & Chan 2011). And a discourse analytical approach, we believe, provides a valuable set of tools and processes to succeed in this worthwhile and necessary undertaking of trying to uncover some of the complexities of leadership performance.…”

“…Angouri 2012Marra 2012). Thus, while Holmes and Marra (2004) found hardly any strong disagreements in their workplace data, Angouri (2012) and Schnurr and Chan (2011) describe workplaces where unmitigated disagreements do frequently occur.…”

“…While leadership psychology is mostly concerned with the perceptions and self-reflections of leaders, discursive leadership focuses on language in use and explores the specific process through which leadership is actually communicated and accomplished in (and through) discourse (e.g. Schnurr & Chan 2011).…”

Legitimizing Claims for ‘Crisis’ Leadership in Global Governance

“…This relatively new approach often positions itself in opposition to traditional leadership psychology (Chen, 2008;Fairhurst, 2007). While leadership psychology is mostly concerned with the perceptions and self-reflections of leaders, discursive leadership focuses on language in use and explores the specific processes through which leadership is communicated and accomplished in and through discourse (Schnurr & Chan, 2011). This means that research in the tradition of discursive leadership is no longer primarily interested in establishing 'grand theories of leadership' (Clifton, 2006, p. 203).…”