Cover not available
Article published In:
Language and Dialogue
Vol. 14:1 (2024) ► pp.122–151

Negotiating leader identities through indirect mockery in talk about decision-making in a distributed leadership context

| University of Jyväskylä
| KU Leuven
| University of Jyväskylä
In this article, we scrutinise how humour, and in particular, indirect mockery contributes to the construction of leader identities in talk about decision-making in an organisation characterized by a distributed leadership context. So rather than focusing on decision-making episodes themselves, we tease out an aspect of the goal achievement side of the leadership influence process. Through multimodal discourse analysis, we focus on episodes in which the implementation side of decisions is discussed and in which the head of the team initiates a humorous sequence, as this turned out to be an integral part of talk about decision-making. We found that the humour was always oriented towards upper management and that it could serve various functions. Overall, we argue that indirect mockery was a crucial means to navigate the tension that emerges from the team head’s position within the complex leadership constellation, thus offering a critical perspective on distributed leadership.
Keywords: discursive leadership, distributed leadership, meetings, humour, laughter, indirect mockery, multimodal discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research aim and method
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Head of the team as a follower
    • 4.2Head of the team as a co-leader
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 December 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00162.sal
References (52)
References
Acuña Ferreira, Virginia A. 2014. “Gossip as indirect mockery in friendly conversation: The social functions of ‘sharing a laugh’ at third parties.” Discourse studies 16 (5): 607–628. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boden, Deirdre. 1994. The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Bolden, Richard. 2011. “Distributed Leadership in Organizations: A Review of Theory and Research.” International Journal of Management Reviews 13(3): 251–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Choi, Seongsook, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2014. “Exploring distributed leadership: Solving disagreements and negotiating consensus in a ‘leaderless’ team.” Discourse Studies 16(1): 3–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clifton, Jonathan. 2006. “A Conversation Analytical Approach to Business Communication: The Case of Leadership.” Journal of Business Communication 43(3): 202–219. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. “Beyond taxonimies of influence: ‘Doing’ influence and making decisions in management team meeting.” Journal of Business Communication 46(1): 57–79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2012. “A discursive approach to leadership. Doing assessments and managing organizational meanings.” Journal of Business Communication 49(2): 148–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017. “Taking the (heroic) leader out of leadership. The in situ practice of distributed leadership in decision-making talk.” In Challenging leadership stereotypes through discourse, ed. by Cornelia Ilie and Stephanie Schnurr. New York: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clifton, Jonathan, Magnus Larsson, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2020. “Leadership in interaction. An introduction to the Special Issue.” Leadership (London, England) 16(5): 511–521. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clifton, Jonathan, Dorien Van De Mieroop, Prachee Sehgal, and Aneet. 2018. “The multimodal enactment of deontic and epistemic authority in Indian meetings.” Pragmatics 28(3): 333–360. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coates, Jennifer. 2007. “Talk in a play frame: More on laughter and intimacy.” Journal of Pragmatics 39(1): 29–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collinson, David. 2006. “Rethinking followership: A post-structuralist analysis of follower identities.” The Leadership Quarterly 17(2): 179–189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Denis, Jean-Louis, Ann Langley, and Viviane Sergi. 2012. “Leadership in the Plural.” The Academy of Management Annals 6(1): 211–283. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeRue, D. Scott and Susan J. Ashford. 2010. “Who will lead and who will follow? A social process of leadership identity construction in organizations.” Academy of Management Review 35(4): 627–647.Google Scholar
Eggins, Suzanne and Diana Slade. 1997. Analysing Casual Conversation. London: Cassell.Google Scholar
Fairhurst, Gail T. 2007. Discursive Leadership. In Conversation with Leadership Psychology. London, England: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairhurst, Gail T., Brad Jackson, Erica Gabrielle Foldy, and Sonia M. Ospina. 2020. “Studying collective leadership: The road ahead.” Human Relations 73(4): 598–614. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ford, Cecilia A. and Barbara E. Fox. 2010. “Multiple practices for constructing laughables.” In Prosody in Interaction, ed. by Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Elisabeth Reder and Margret Selting, 339–368. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gee, James Paul, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. 1996. The New Work Order. London: Saint Leonards Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Glenn, Philip. 2003. Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gumperz, John J. 1992. “Contextualization and understanding.” In Rethinking Context. Language as an interactive phenomenon, ed. by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 230–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Haakana, Markku and Marja-Leena Sorjonen. 2011. “Invoking another context: Playfulness in buying lottery tickets at convenience stores.” Journal of Pragmatics 43(5): 1288–1302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 2006. “Sharing a laugh: Pragmatic aspects of humor and gender in the workplace.” Journal of Pragmatics 38(1): 26–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet and Meredith Marra. 2006. “Humor and leadership style.” Humor – International Journal of Humor Research 19(2): 119–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Bernadette Vine. 2011. Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holt, Elizabeth. 2011. “On the nature of “laughables”: Laughter as a response to overdone figurative phrases.” Pragmatics: Quarterly publication of the International Pragmatics Association 21(3): 393–410.Google Scholar
Honkanen, Suvi and Riikka Nissi. 2014. “Managing organizational change through joint vision building: an analysis of practices of recontextualization” In Analysing Text AND Talk: Att analysera texter OCH samtal, ed. by Anna-Malin Karlsson and Henna Makkonen-Craig, 28–43. Uppsala: Uppsala universitet.Google Scholar
Hosking, Dian Marie. 1988. “Organizing, leadership and skilful process.” Journal of Management Studies 25 (2): 147–166. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huisman, Marjan. 2001. “Decision-Making in Meetings as Talk-in-Interaction.” International Studies of Management & Organization 31(3): 69–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kangasharju, Helena and Tuija Nikko. 2009. “Emotions in Organizations: Joint Laughter in Workplace Meetings.” The Journal of Business Communication (1973) 46(1): 100–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kelly, Simon. 2008. “Leadership: A categorical mistake?” Human Relations 61(6): 763–782. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. “Towards a negative ontology of leadership.” Human Relations 67(8): 905–922. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larsson, Magnus. 2017. “Leadership in Interaction.” In Routledge Companion to Leadership, ed. by John Storey, Jean Hartley, Jean-Louis Denis, Paul ‘t Hart and Dave Ulrich, 173–193. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Larsson, Magnus, Jonathan Clifton, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2021. “The fallacy of discrete authentic leader behaviours: Locating authentic leadership in interaction.” Leadership 17(4): 421–440. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lehtinen, Marjukka. 2012. Episteemisen auktoriteetin ja yhteisen ymmärryksen konstruointi kokouskeskustelussa. Fokuksessa -hAn-lausumat. [Constructing Epistemic Authority and Shared Understanding in Meeting Talk: A Focus on Utterances Containing the Finnish Clitic Particle -hAn.] Helsinki: Aalto University publication series.Google Scholar
Mondada, Lorenza. 2016. “Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(3): 336–366. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Northouse, Peter. 2016. Leadership: theory and practice, 7th edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Sarangi, Srikant and Celia Roberts. 1999. “Introduction.” In Talk, work and institutional order; discourse in medical, mediation and management settings, ed. by Srikant Sarangi and Celia Roberts, 61–74. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schnurr, Stephanie. 2009a. “Constructing leader identities through teasing at work.” Journal of Pragmatics 41(6): 1125–1138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009b. Leadership Discourse at Work: Interactions of humour, gender and workplace culture. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schnurr, Stephanie, and Angela Chan. 2011. “Exploring another side of co-leadership: Negotiating professional identities through face-work in disagreements.” Language in Society 40 (2):187–209. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sorjonen, Marja-Leena. 2018. “Reformulating prior speaker’s turn in Finnish: Turn-initial “siis”, “eli(kkä)”, and “nii(n) et(tä)”.” In Between turn and sequence: Turn-initial particles across languages, ed. by John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen, 251–286. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stogdill, Ralph M. 1950. “Leadership, membership and organisation.” Psychological Bulletin 471: 1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thornborrow, Joanna and Deborah Morris. 2004. “Gossip as strategy: The management of talk about others on reality TV show ‘Big Brother’.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(2): 246–271. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van De Mieroop, Dorien. 2020. “A deontic perspective on the collaborative, multimodal accomplishment of leadership.” Leadership 16 (5): 592–619. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van De Mieroop, Dorien and Jonathan Clifton. 2017. “Corporate settings.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace, ed. by Bernadette Vine, 127–137. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van De Mieroop, Dorien, Jonathan Clifton, and Avril Verhelst. 2020. “Investigating the interplay between formal and informal leaders in a shared leadership configuration: A multimodal conversation analytical study.” Human Relations 73(4): 490–515. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van De Mieroop, Dorien and Jolien Wouters. 2020. “Co-leiderschap in vergaderingen.” Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing 42(3): 249–277. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vine, Bernadette, Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra, Dale Pfeifer, and Brad Jackson. 2008. “Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics.” Leadership 4(3): 339–360. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vöge, Monika. 2010. “Local identity processes in business meetings displayed through laughter in complaint sequences.” Journal of Pragmatics 42(6): 1556–1576. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watson, Cate and Valerie Drew. 2017. “Humour and laughter in meetings: Influence, decision-making and the emergence of leadership.” Discourse & Communication 11(3): 314–329. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yukl, Gary. 1989. “Managerial Leadership: A Review of Theory and Research.” Journal of management 15 (2): 251–289. DOI logoGoogle Scholar