Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 242

Part of Session 153: Working in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Co-constructing leader identities in performance appraisal interviews

Authors: Schnurr, Stephanie (1); Van De Mieroop, Dorien (2)
Submitted by: Van De Mieroop, Dorien (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Although there is little agreement among scholars as to how to define leadership, recent trends conceptualize this complex notion as a performance or an activity and acknowledge the crucial role of discourse for the construction and enactment of leadership (e.g. Fairhurst 2007, Tourish & Jackson 2008, Angouri & Marra 2011). In line with these developments, recent research has started to explore some of the discursive processes through which leadership is enacted and through which leader identities are literally talked into being (e.g. Holmes et al 2011, Schnurr 2009).

We intend to foreground this constructionist nature of leadership by focusing on the way one interlocutor constructs her identity as a leader in four performance appraisal interviews that were audiotaped in a Dutch medical lab in 2011 and complemented by two ethnographic interviews (one with the interviewer and one with an interviewee). Although these performance appraisal interviews are highly pre-structured by means of a questionnaire and thus demonstrate a relatively high degree of similarity, the way the interviewer talks her role as a leader into being on a turn by turn basis, differs quite strongly depending on a number of contextual reasons that are explicitly made relevant within these interactions.

Our analyses demonstrate that the interviewer sometimes explicitly orients to the interviewee’s hierarchical position, ambitions, track record and interactional personality traits and modulates a different level of negotiation accordingly. Of particular interest is the observation that these negotiation levels, which reflect the continuum between hierarchical authoritarian and interpersonal egalitarian leadership styles (Wodak, Kwon & Clarke, 2011), do not only fluctuate from one interaction to another, but also within each interaction. As a consequence, there are different amounts of collaboration in the meaning making process between interlocutors.

Particularly interesting in this respect, is the way the interviewer’s minute taking is interactionally dealt with. Since the minutes of this meeting form the basis of the appraisal report regarding the interviewee, these have an important influence on the way such interactions get institutionalized. Zooming in on the collaborative and negotiated nature of the formulation of these minutes and by investigating which information from the previous discussion is filtered in this process, we illustrate how interlocutors negotiate and co-construct their roles and identities with a particular focus on how they collaboratively construct the interviewee’s leader identity as it shifts from one turn to the next and from one interaction to another.

References

Angouri, Jo & Meredith Marra (eds) (2011). Constructing Identities at Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fairhurst, Gail (2007). Discursive Leadership. In Conversation with Leadership Psychology. London: Sage.

Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra & Bernadette Vine (2011). Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schnurr, Stephanie (2009). Leadership Discourse at Work. Interactions of Humour, Gender and Workplace Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tourish, Dennis & Brad Jackson (eds) (2008). Leadership. Special Issue on Communication and Leadership.

Wodak, R., Kwon, W. & Clarke, I. (2011). ‘Getting people on board’: Discursive leadership for consensus building in team meetings. Discourse & Society 22(5): 592-644.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Co-constructing leader identities in performance appraisal interviews