Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics

Abstract

This article seeks to bring to the fore the processes by which leaders co-create leadership through collective talk within the workplace. Co-leadership has recently been recognized as an important aspect of leadership practice, especially at the top of organizations, yet it remains under-theorized and empirically under-explored. Guided by the desire to integrate concepts that have emerged from leadership psychology with discursive leadership approaches, this exploratory empirical study applies a specific form of discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, to three different organizational contexts. Because interactional sociolinguistics focuses on the ways in which relationships are seen to be negotiated and maintained through talk, it is well placed to analyse leadership, a relational process involving leaders and followers that is predicated on asymmetrical power relations. The analysis demonstrates how successful co-leaders cooperate, dynamically shifting roles and integrating their leadership performance to encompass task-related and maintenance-related functions of leadership.

Leadership as Cultural Practice

“…Surely, leadership is not only a result of social processes, but also a contextual element that influences interactions. Thus, daily-shared conversations play an important role in the production of leadership (Uhl-Bien, 2006;Vine, Holmes, Marra, Pfeifer, & Jackson, 2008;Wood 2005).…”

Phrases that signal workplace hierarchy

“…Bosses will often inject humor to soften the blow of their words and to build loyalty [12]. They also use collective talk (e.g., "let's all give it a try") to build support for themselves as leaders [33]. We look for evidence of this theory later in the paper when we examine the structure of the most predictive phrases.…”

Ingroups and Outgroups in Complaints: Exploring Politic Behaviour in Nurses’ Discourse

“…In this light, we can most likely be said to exclude the nurses and to refer to a new ingroup involving Eve and Nick. This interpretation is supported by Eve's use of we in line 11, which seems to more clearly represent the management team, Nick and Eve, (see co-leadership in Vine, Holmes, Marra, Pfeifer & Jackson, 2008), who are the only ones in this ward with the capacity to be lenient on management issues. In this case, then, we is actually excluding (rather than including, as often argued, see Enyedy and Goldberg, 2004) Eve's interlocutors while she indexes a group affiliation with members who are not present.…”