Micro‐Level Discursive Strategies for Constructing Shared Views around Strategic Issues in Team Meetings

Abstract

Management scholars have explored how certain actors in meetings – especially leaders – shape social processes of interaction and use different linguistic devices, as methods, to affect how sense is made of strategic issues. Less attention has been paid to interactions between members of the team as a whole and the repertoire of discursive strategies, or goal‐directed behaviours, that they deploy to create shared views around issues. We analyse rare empirical episodes of team discussions of strategic issues in board meetings to inductively conceptualize how this is achieved. To do this we use the Discourse‐Historical Approach (DHA) to critical discourse analysis (CDA). We reveal five discursive strategies teams use to develop shared views around strategic issues (Re/defining, Equalizing, Simplifying, Legitimating, and Reconciling) and demonstrate how they are skilfully operationalized through a range of linguistic devices or means.

Constructing Spaces for Strategic Work: A Multimodal Perspective

“…This has provided valuable insights into the discursive practices through which managers at different levels of the firm participate in (Mantere & Vaara, 2008), make sense of (Balogun & Johnson, 2004;Rouleau, 2005) and enact their strategic roles (Rouleau & Balogun, 2011;Mantere, 2008). Such discursive work is undoubtedly consequential in developing, sharing and implementing strategy, including negotiating F o r R e v i e w O n l y 3 through the inevitable ambiguities and contradictions that are integral to strategizing (e.g., Abdallah & Langley, 2014;Dameron & Torset, 2014;Kwon, Clarke & Wodak, 2014;Sillince, Jarzabkowski & Shaw 2012). Discursive practices are, for example, central to the way that middle managers make sense of and enact organizational restructuring during strategic change (e.g.…”

Estratégia como Prática Social: um Estudo de Práticas Discursivas no Fazer Estratégia

“…Kwon et al (2014) revelaram cinco estratégias discursivas: igualização, re/definição, simplificação, legitimação e conciliação. Das cinco, duas ratificam os achados desta pesquisa, são elas: igualização -nela os membros da equipe buscam incentivar a participação dos demais envolvidos para que emerjam novas ideias, pontos de vista; simplificação -trata-se da busca por minimizar a complexidade das definições para que sejam valorizadas as ideias mais importantes para o processo.…”

“…Na pesquisa de Kwon et al (2014) sobre a EPS, dentre os recursos linguísticos utilizados, os autores apresentaram a simplificação que envolve os membros da equipe que tentam reduzir a complexidade das definições concorrentes em razão da baixa compreensão.…”

Assessing Shared Strategic Understanding

“…Below a summary of representative methods used to study team cognitive concepts is presented (see Table 4): Dialogue acts Kim et al (2013) Ranking procedure Winner et al (2007) Conversation analysis Kwon et al (2014) To capture shared cognition there are several methods and techniques. In particular, methods for measuring shared mental models have gained a lot of attention (Langan-Fox et al, 2000;Mohammed et al, 2000;Wildman et al, 2014).…”