communication and leadership an open invitation to engage

7/29/2019 Communication and Leadership an Open Invitation to Engage

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Leadership

DOI: 10.1177/17427150080923592008; 4; 219Leadership

Dennis Tourish and Brad JacksonGuest Editorial: Communication and Leadership: An Open Invitation to Engage

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Leadership

Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore)

Vol 4(3): 219225 DOI: 10.1177/1742715008092359 http://lea.sagepub.com

Guest Editorial

Communication and Leadership: An OpenInvitation to EngageDennis Tourish and Brad Jackson,Robert Gordon University, UK and

The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Leadership can be viewed as a process dependent on the exercise of reciprocal influ-

ence between leaders and followers, in the context of a sometimes contested struggle

for meaning, power, and resources. Communication, in all its multifaceted forms, is

therefore at the heart of the leadership process. The exploration of this dynamic forms

the crux of this Special Issue.

We hope that it is a timely contribution to scholarship within the domains of both

leadership and organizational communication. But we also entertain the hope that it

is much more than this. The initial impulse to embark on this project was ourrealization that, like slightly distrustful strangers, the two fields of inquiry have kept

largely apart. If the current issue of this journal falls short of a marriage, we hope

that it is at least an invitation to courtship and perhaps, if all goes well

engagement.

Consider the literature. A search ofThe Leadership Quarterly discloses a total

of nine articles that either directly or indirectly address communication in the

journals nineteen-year history. While some of these deal at length with phenom-

enon in which communication is a critical variable, such as the rhetoric of US

presidents when addressing issues of social change (Seyranian & Bligh, 2008),

these are the exception rather than the rule. Most address communication tangen-

tially: for example, as one of many factors contributing to the development of trust

(Burke et al., 2007).

This lack of mutual contemplation extends beyond academic conferences and

scholarly journals. Thus, an important text on transformational leadership (Bass &

Riggio, 2006) devotes roughly one sentence to communication, in which it is char-

acterized as a key competence when conveying a vision. What this competence

consists of is left unexplained. It is also true that, despite some intriguing forays, the

field of organizational communication has had a limited engagement with the world

of leadership. TheJournal of Business Communication, one of the key journals in

the field, has been in existence since 1963. In that time, it has published no more than

40 papers which address leadership issues, rather less than one for each year of its

existence.

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In essence, despite an evident overlap of interest, inter-disciplinary expeditions

between leadership and communication scholars have been chiefly notable for their

rarity. This is all the more remarkable given that most practitioners readily identify

superior communication skills as being the primary attribute required by effective

leaders. Nevertheless, it has been obvious for some years that a dynamic researchagenda is emerging with the potential to impact radically on the twin fields of

communication and leadership. This was reflected in our call for papers, which

identified a range of topics where we saw emerging synergies in leadership communi-

cation research. These included:

s The discursive processes by which leadership is constructed and enacted.

Much more work is now being done in this area (e.g. Fairhurst, 2007). It

includes examination of the conversational practices among leaders which

seek to explain, justify, enact or otherwise make sense of the leadership role;

parallel conversational practices among non-leaders; and conversational

interaction between leaders and non-leaders. It also encompasses all forms oflanguage use by leaders as they attempt to enact their leadership functions,

such as the language used by CEOs, in a variety of written and oral forms

(Amernic et al., 2007).

s Information exchange between leaders and followers. While much leadership

research seems to view leadership influence as a uni-directional process, in

which powerful leaders control the behaviors of largely passive followers, it

is also clear that noise, deviance and resistance also constitute organizations

(Fleming & Spicer, 2008). In such a context, how do leaders and followers

really exert influence on the other? How do they respond to the

communicative acts to which they are subjected, and to the communicationsof fellow leaders and non-leaders? Feedback processes are inevitably an

important aspect of this issue (Atwater & Waldman, 2008).

s Communication networks and their impact on leadership processes. The

construction of such networks impact dramatically on leaderfollower

perceptions of themselves and each other. Precisely how communication

networks are affected by various forms of leadership practice remains an

important issue in leadership research (Monge & Contractor, 2001).

s The measurement and evaluation of communication between leaders and

followers. This may include, but is not be limited to, how communication

audit processes and measurement tools can illuminate the communicative

dynamics that underpin the leadership process.

s The interpersonal communication dynamics that characterize the exercise of

leadership. For example, impression management by leaders may be

calculated to convey an air of certainty where little or none exists, or to

justify particular courses of action to both leaders and followers where this is

deemed vital to face saving (Tourish & Robson, 2006). Ongoing research

issues include the particular impression management approaches used by

leaders and/or followers (such as listening, conformity, ingratiation, and

silence) as they enact their relationship. It may also include consideration of

the effects that various leadership communication styles and skills have on

the willingness of followers to endorse leader actions.

Leadership 4(3)

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s Charisma as a socially constructed communicative process. While many

scholars have argued that charisma can be theorized as an attributional

phenomenon, there has been relatively little examination of the

communicative processes whereby charismatic leaders activate attributional

processes through the skilled use of rhetoric, image manipulation, andmessage design. Rather, the widespread assumption seems to be that such

leaders hold their position of (legitimate) authority because they possess

powerful personalities and have an ability to render penetrating diagnoses of

the needs of organizations and employees (Collinson, 2005). A

communication perspective can vastly enrich our understanding of such

issues.

s The role of visionin the exercise of transformational leadership. A

transformational leader is assumed to energetically communicate a vision or

idealized future for the organization one that it is believed has the potency

to attract followers (Awamleh & Gardner, 1999). From a communicationperspective, key questions that arise include what properties of the visions

articulated by leaders have the most impact on followers, and are most likely

to engage or fail to engage their attention, interest and commitment? A more

critical perspective on transformational leadership is also developing, and it is

again one in which we see fruitful scope for engagement by organizational

communication researchers.

Our call for papers articulated these issues. It attracted 33 submissions, of which 22

were desk rejected by the editors. We were principally guided by the extent to which

the submissions addressed the core concerns highlighted in our call for papers.Several explored communication dynamics that had little relevance for the theory or

practice of leadership, while others focused on leadership issues that had little do

with communication. We also considered the degree to which submissions employed

a robust theoretical framework; offered a coherent, convincing argument in favor of

particular propositions that were being made; the extent to which they were utilizing

an appropriate methodology; and, above all, whether they were both interesting and

contributed to knowledge. Submissions which fell into the true, but trivial category

failed to make it into the reviewing process. We have in mind papers that offered

findings along the lines that change is difficult, leaders talk a great deal to their

followers, and that followers expect to receive information from leaders. The real

world of leadership in organizations offers an exhaustive array of theoretical, empiri-

cal and applied challenges: in our view, scholars should focus their energies on issues

that are genuinely important, and where further illumination is required. Eleven

remaining papers were reviewed, from which the six that are published in this Special

Issue remain.

The first two articles featured in this Special Issue take on the task of designing

and constructing a theoretical bridge across which communication and leadership

scholars might come together to develop a common research agenda and integrate

research methodologies. In the first article, Kevin Barge and Gail Fairhurst challenge

the predominance within the leadership field of leadership psychologys individual-

istic worldview. They seek to replace this worldview with a social and cultural

perspective that sees leadership as a lived experience that is preoccupied with

Leadership Guest Editorial Tourish & Jackson



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answering the following three questions: (1) How is leadership performed? (2) What

counts as leadership? (3) What are the consequences of particular leadership

constructions? In the interests of promoting such a worldview, Barge and Fairhurst

offer a practical theory of leadership which is grounded in systemic thinking and

social constructionism. The systemic constructionist approach conceptualizes leader-ship as a co-created, performative, attributional and contextual process. Through

leadership, ideas are articulated in talk or action that are recognized by others as

being able to make progress on tasks that are important to them. The authors devote

the remainder of the article to showing how their systemic constructionist approach

can help leadership researchers to frame and analyse three important leadership

discursive practices: (1) sensemaking, (2) positioning, and (3) play.

In the second theoretically oriented article, Ian Ashman and John Lawler construct

their theoretical bridge by introducing and drawing upon a number of existentialist

philosophers and concepts, in an effort not only to bring the fields of communication

and leadership closer together, but also to foster a much needed critically reflexivecounterpoint to the instrumental approach that they argue pervades most extant

leadership research. The authors highlight the salience of an existentialist analysis

by pointing to contemporary orthodox thinking regarding the centrality of communi-

cation to leadership practice. Jaspers conceptualization of existential communication

is introduced along with Bubers ideas on communication as relationship and

dialogue. Their article thus explores concepts that they regard as important facets of

leader communication, including Being-in-the-world, the Other, intersubjectivity,

dialogue and indirect communication.

This kind of inventive and well-argued theoretical work will undoubtedly be

important in promoting a long-term sustainable rapprochement between the fields ofleadership and communication. However, we were also pleased to receive many

empirically oriented submissions. Empirical work is often viewed as being the poorer

and less valued partner, but we believe that hard-grafting exploratory work under-

taken in the field of practice is critical for this rapprochement to spark and combust.

It is also vital that theoretical and empirical work are linked in such a way that the

two streams consciously inform and reinforce each other. The four empirical studies

that are featured in this Special Issue are illustrative of the wide range of contexts

within which this work is being conducted from large multinational corporations

to regionally distributed not-for-profit organizations to small and medium enterprises

(SMEs) that are based in an array of geographic locales. The articles also demon-

strate a range of methodologies that can be deployed to analyse the relationship

between communication and leadership from traditional survey, interview and

documentary methods to a range of discourse analyses.

The first empirical article presented by Jennifer Ziegler and Michael DeGrosky

takes us to the unusual setting of wildland firefighting in the Unites States: that is,

fighting fires beyond human habitation in forests and grasslands. Their highly

instructive case study shows how a leadership initiative that was introduced for sound

strategic and tactical reasons into a wildland fire organization did not combust in the

way that it was originally intended! The leadership initiative was inspired by the

German military philosophy of Auftragstaktik, which recommends communicating

leaders intent.By applying communication metadiscourse theory to the case study,

Ziegler and DeGrosky are able to helpfully distinguish between the theoretical

Leadership 4(3)



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discourse of leadership that the senior management intended to promote within the

organization with the practical metadiscourse of communication that emerged to

explain, shape and ultimately derail its implementation. This study reveals why so

often organizations might attempt to adopt a new approach to leadership for all of

the right reasons, but then implement these theories wrongly by relying on incom-patible and potentially outmoded models of communication. The authors not only

highlight what went wrong but also show how the utilization of alternative communi-

cation models could have expanded the practical metadiscourse of communication

so that it was better aligned with the theoretical metadiscourse of leadership that the

organization purported to introduce.

Moving from the macro- to the micro-level of analysis, Stephanie Schnurr focuses

on the use of humor as one of the prime means through which leaders communicate

with their followers to achieve various transactional as well as relational objectives.

Specifically, her study explores some of the ways in which women leaders make use

of this particularly versatile discursive strategy to enhance, and not just maintain,their leadership performance. Drawing on a mixture of recorded, interview and

documentary data, Schnurr reveals how the women leaders she studied also used

humor to address the all-too common challenge of being the odd girl out in a

predominantly masculine work environment. They skillfully employed humor to

portray themselves as effective leaders while at the same time negotiating and

performing their gender identities in a masculine domain. The article concludes,

therefore, that contrary to conventional wisdom, the ability to combine elements from

a relatively feminine style with those of a more masculine style of interaction assists

leaders, irrespective of gender, in accomplishing an effective leadership style.

There has been great deal of recent interest, much of it fanned by media hype, inthe challenges of communicating within an increasingly virtual world in which

greater use is made of the internet at the expense of the traditional realmedia. When

communication has been theorized by leadership scholars it has tended to assume the

form of regular synchronic face-to-face interaction between leaders and followers.

In their article, Peter Zimmerman, Arjaan Wit and Roger Gill tackle this problem

head on by asking how the degree of virtualness in the daily work conducted by team

members might affect the perceived importance of various leadership behaviors in

virtual and face-to-face communication settings. From a survey they conducted of

technical engineers who worked as members of teams at Shell Global Solutions Inter-

national, they note that, with a few exceptions, most task-oriented as well as relation-

ship-oriented leadership behaviors are considered to be more important in virtual

settings than in face-to-face settings. In fact, the relative importance of many leader-

ship behaviors increases the higher the degree of virtualness in team membersdaily

work. Essentially then, again contrary to popular belief, the authors infer that leader-

ship is even more significant in the virtual world and, therefore, leaders need to

become even more skilled communicators if they operate primarily within the virtual

realm. Their conclusions will be of interest to practitioners as well as academics.

The distinction between task-oriented and relationship-oriented leadership

behaviors is also taken up in the final article that is featured in the Special Issue.

Bernadette Vine, Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra, Dale Pfeifer and Brad Jackson bring

to the fore the processes by which not just one leader (as is generally assumed) but

several leaders co-create leadership through face-to-face collective talk within the




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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 call issued by Fairhurst

(2007), encouraging researchers to actively integrate concepts that have emerged

from leadership psychology with discursive leadership approaches, this exploratoryempirical study applies a specific form of discourse analysis, Interactional Socio-

linguistics, to three different SME contexts. The analysis demonstrates how success-

ful co-leaders cooperate, dynamically shift roles and integrate their leadership

performance to encompass task-related and maintenance-related functions of

leadership.

These six articles provide grounds for some optimism that the traditionally

isolated fields of leadership and communication may indeed have a bright and

progenious future together. However, as the well-worn clich suggests, there is still

a great deal of work to be done. It is our hope that the articles in this Special Issue

will stimulate, provoke, and enlighten readers of the Journal. Above all, we hope thatthey sprinkle some seeds that will lead to a flowering of scholarship in this area.

Organizational communication and leadership scholars occupy adjacent territories:

we can only gain from a cross fertilization of ideas. This Special Issue is an attempt

to achieve precisely that. We warmly thank all contributors and reviewers for their

efforts in making it possible. Above all, we want to acknowledge the indispensable

administrative support we received from Angela Morgan at Auckland University

Business School, who brought much appreciated organization to our efforts and

managed an enormous volume of correspondence with unfailing good humor and

efficiency. All guest editors should be this fortunate.

References

Amernic, J., Craig, R., & Tourish, D. (2007) The Transformational Leader as Pedagogue,

Physician, Architect, Commander, and Saint: Five Root Metaphors in Jack Welchs

Letters to Stockholders of General Electric,Human Relations 60(12): 183972.

Atwater, L., & Waldman, D. (2008)Leadership, Feedback and the Open Communication

Gap. London: Erlbaum.

Awamleh, R., & Gardner, W. (1999) Perceptions of Leader Charisma and Effectiveness: The

Effects of Vision Content, Delivery, and Organizational Performance, The Leadership

Quarterly 10(3): 34573.

Bass, B., & Riggio, R. (2006) Transformational Leadership, 2nd edn. London: Erlbaum.Burke, C., Sims, D., Lazzara, E., & Salas, E. (2007) Trust in Leadership: A Multi-Level

Review and Integration, The Leadership Quarterly 18(6): 60632.

Collinson, D. (2005) Dialectics of Leadership,Human Relations 58(11): 141942.

Fairhurst, G. (2007)Discursive Leadership: In Conversation With Leadership Psychology.

London: SAGE.

Fleming, P., & Spicer, A (2008) Beyond Power and Resistance: New Approaches to

Organizational Politics,Management Communication Quarterly 21(3): 3019.

Monge, P., & Contractor, N. (2001) Emergence of Communication Networks, in F. Jablin

and L. Putnam (eds) The New Handbook of Organizational Communication: Advances in

Theory, Research, and Methods, pp. 440502. London: SAGE.

Seyranian, V., & Bligh, M. (2008) Presidential Charismatic Leadership: Exploring theRhetoric of Social Change, The Leadership Quarterly 19(1): 5476.

Leadership 4(3)



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Tourish, D., & Robson, P. (2006) Sensemaking and the Distortion of Critical Upward

Communication in Organizations,Journal of Management Studies 43(4): 71130.

Dennis Tourish is Professor of Leadership and Management at Aberdeen Business

School within the Robert Gordon University. He has published over 60 papers,chapters and six books on organizational communication, leadership, group

dynamics and cults. His work has appeared in journals such as Human Relations,

Journal of Management Studies, Long Range Planning andLeadership. He is the

co-editor, with Owen Hargie, of Auditing Organizational Communication: A

Handbook of Research, Theory and Practice, forthcoming later this year. He serves

on the Editorial Boards of Human Relations, Management Communication

Quarterly andLeadership.

Brad Jackson is the Fletcher Building Education Trust Professor of Leadership at

The University of Auckland Business School. He was formerly Director of the Centre

for the Study of Leadership and Head of School of the Management School at

Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Jackson has spoken to academic

and business audiences throughout the world and has published four books

Management Gurus and Management Fashions, The Hero Manager, Organisational

Behaviour in New Zealand and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably

Cheap Book About Studying Leadership.



communication and leadership an open invitation to engage

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