‘Getting people on board’: Discursive leadership for consensus building in team meetings

Abstract

Meetings are increasingly seen as sites where organizing and strategic change take place, but the role of specific discursive strategies and related linguistic-pragmatic and argumentative devices, employed by meeting chairs, is little understood. The purpose of this article is to address the range of behaviours of chairs in business organizations by comparing strategies employed by the same chief executive officer (CEO) in two key meeting genres: regular management team meetings and 'away-days'. While drawing on research from organization studies on the role of leadership in meetings and studies of language in the workplace from (socio)linguistics and discourse studies, we abductively identified five salient discursive strategies which meeting chairs employ in driving decision making: (1) Bonding; (2) Encouraging; (3) Directing; (4) Modulating; and (5) Re/Committing. We investigate the leadership styles of the CEO in both meeting genres via a multi-level approach using empirical data drawn from meetings of a single management team in a multinational defence corporation. Our key findings are, first, that the chair of the meetings (and leading manager) influences the outcome of the meetings in both negative and positive ways, through the choice of discursive strategies. Second, it becomes apparent that the specific context and related meeting genre mediate participation and the ability of the chair to control interactions

The role of the associate dean in UK universities: distributed leadership in action?

“…Here, we can see how important the role of language and communication are to distributed leadership processes in universities in order to 'get people on board' and for change to be initiated from within rather than from the top, as has been shown in research into business organisations (Whittle et al 2015;Wodak et al 2011). These findings have clear implications for the development needs of people who take on such roles, as well as for the focus and content of traditional institutional leadership development programmes which are often based on outmoded top-down training models instead of drawing on more relational approaches to management development (Preston and Floyd 2016).…”

“…One of the ways that some of the associate deans practiced leadership without any perceived formal authority was through discursive leadership strategies (Fairhurst 2008;Fairhurst 2009;Wodak et al 2011) which included negotiation, persuasion, relationship building, and as one said, 'charm and common sense'. Here, we can see how important the role of language and communication are to distributed leadership processes in universities in order to 'get people on board' and for change to be initiated from within rather than from the top, as has been shown in research into business organisations (Whittle et al 2015;Wodak et al 2011).…”

“…Accordingly, although the practice of distributing leadership is widespread across the sector, associated issues such as problems with accountability and power (Bolden et al 2008;Corrigan 2013), differences between delegation and real authority (Owens and Valesky 2011), tensions between isomorphism and its perceived negative effect on academic values and identities (Blaschke et al 2014;Hartley 2009), and links to discursive leadership practices (Fairhurst 2008;Fairhurst 2009;Whittle et al 2015;Wodak et al 2011) have not been sufficiently addressed. It is these key issues that this article seeks to explore.…”

“…Beyond the notion of viewing distributed leadership simply as the delegation of decision rights to particular roles, adjacent work in organisation studies and linguistics suggest that leadership is discursive and that language and communication play an important and powerful role in the leadership process across all levels of an organisation (Wodak et al 2011). The argument put forward by these authors is that in order to understand organisational leadership processes, it is necessary to explore leadership discourse, communication, and relational stances, and that leadership involves influence and meaning management distributed amongst several actors rather than necessarily just residing with one person in an appointed role (Fairhurst 2008;Fairhurst 2009).…”

Developing the Synergy between University and Industry-based Nursing Courses: Lessons in Engagement

“…Finally, when everyone is committed to a common purpose, the task is more easily accomplished. Wodak, Knon and Clarke [20] assert that this means achieving the right balance. Commitment to a purpose helps one move past one's own initial thinking, and allows one to listen to a diversity of ideas and to make an emotionally intelligent response [8].…”