Gail Fairhurst

University of Cincinnati | UC · Department of Communication

This chapter reviews the recent work on leadership dialectics of the last 20+ years. It argues that rethinking deeply embedded dichotomies in dialectical terms can enrich and deepen the study of leadership, open new approaches to theory and practice, and address important ontological, epistemological and methodological implications for research and...

In this essay, I explore the possible declining interest in Organizational Discourse Analysis (ODA) in the organisational sciences. Towards that end, I focus on what some analysts mistake about it, why it is particularly suited to the study of paradox and leadership, and how ODA scholars can sustain interest in these approaches.

In the concluding article, we move from providing a map of the collective leadership (CL) research field that has been conducted to date to providing a travel guide that we hope can inspire both experienced and novice travelers to push out the frontiers of exploration of CL. A Rapid Appraisal analysis of the extant CL research revealed that most of...

In this introductory article we explain the impetus for creating the Special Issue, along with its goals and the process by which we created it. We present a map of the terrain of collective leadership (CL) that builds on earlier frameworks, recognizing that the terrain is expanding and has become increasingly difficult to traverse. The map is comp...

This symposium explored the coexistence and conflicts between leadership hierarchy and collective leadership both in theory and practice.

Cunha, M. P., and Putnam, L. L. (2017. Paradox theory and the paradox of success. Strategic Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.l177/1476127017739536) argued that paradox research has fallen victim to its own success. In a race for institutionalization, paradoxes have putatively been removed from their natural habitat and ‘tamed,’ as the search for...

Reacting to the impact of Pope Francis and President Donald J. Trump on the world stage, New York Times essayist, Austen Ivereigh, asked the question, “Is Pope Francis the Anti-Trump?” He concluded that the answer is not an obvious one. Using qualitative methods, this study explores this question through the dialectical tensions and management stra...

The study of organizational tensions, contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes is on the rise in the organizational sciences. This article sets forth an integrative methodology for studying these oppositional phenomena by aligning grounded theory techniques with the little “d” and big “D” orientations of organizational discourse analysis. This int...

How does organizing proceed when leadership is both shared and hierarchical? Who sets the context, how and when do people share influence, and who produces authoritative texts for going forward? Using the lens of authoring claims and grants (Taylor and Van Every, 2014), we display the complex relationship between shared and hierarchical leadership...

From an analysis of two age diverse samples in which we explored the ways “generation” is understood in the workforce, we make several contributions to generational research. First, we propose new conceptualizations on generations in the workforce. They are: contribution (a generation is defined based on the impact its members make on society or or...

Modern scientific research on leadership in organizations has been evolving for nearly a century. Over the course of its development, four particular discourses of leadership have emerged: normative, interpretive, critical, and dialogical. This entry surveys major leadership theories and research within each discourse. It pays particular attention...

We examine the case of a corporate spin-off, in which its reacquisition by the parent firm radically changed its structure and culture. Employing a discourse lens, we study paradoxical tensions of innovation as key members “talk into being” the paradoxical circumstances of their environment. From our analysis, we develop the concept of tensional “k...

This article presents a constitutive approach to the study of organizational contradictions, dialectics, paradoxes, and tensions. In particular, it highlights five constitutive dimensions (i.e., discourse, developmental actions, socio-historical conditions, presence in multiples, and praxis) that appear across the literature in five metatheoretical...

Paradox theory stands at an exciting moment in organization and management theory. Scholars increasingly seek out insights about the nature and management of contradictory demands to explain a wide array of organizational phenomena across multiple levels of analysis. Our two reviews in the 2016 Academy of Management Annals attest to this growing br...

How do leaders make and justify decisions during exceedingly complex times? This question is examined through a focus on the roadblocks that leaders themselves throw in the way of their effectiveness; an ethical orientation that seems increasingly lacking; and the growing need for collaboration, clumsy solutions, and organizations dedicated to civi...

In this article, we express our appreciation for the honor accorded our 2004 Communication Theory article, "Organizations as Discursive Constructions." We do this through situating the 2004 article historically so the reader can appreciate the milieu that surrounded the publication of this piece. We also trace the different ways that scholars have...

The congruence model of leader–member exchange (LMX) quality predicts that agreement between leader and members regarding relationship quality is associated with follower performance. However, questions remain over how cultural relational norms influence congruence. This study, based on a government-linked international joint venture in Malaysia, i...

This paper reviews the literature on communication in organizations most relevant to the study of leadership. Although leadership communication research has a history of significant overlap with leadership psychology, the value commitments of a communicative orientation now find expression in a large body of extant literature that this paper review...

There was a time when survey research was our only viable means of studying leadership processes. That is no longer the case. In its many forms, ODA offers a fly-on-the-wall methodology for researchers to see more of how leadership unfolds in a co-created process among relational beings. We showcase a discursive perspective and ODA as a broad set o...

The so-called " linguistic turn" purportedly has allowed scholars to demonstrate why it seems so important to focus on language, discourse, and social interaction when studying organizational phenomena. However, it could be argued that it also led them to neglect some key aspects of the role material agency plays in organizational processes, a negl...

When an organizational vision or change initiative fails in an organization, it is usually not because the CEO or some senior vice president has suddenly decided not to pursue it any longer, Gail T. Fairhurst argues. “On the contrary, the death-knell sounds gradually” each time a leader loses an opportunity to frame the vision or initiative to dail...

A growing body of literature now exists concerning the social construction of leadership. This literature draws on a variety of definitions of social constructionism, multiple constructs, and an array of perspectives, approaches, and methods. To identify and understand the differences among them, this article provides a sailing guide, comprising fo...

Leadership scholars and lay actors often attribute a certain presence to great leaders in describing a commanding style or a charismatic personality. However, leadership presence and its mirror concept, absence, have been difficult concepts for researchers to study. This article proposes to redress this short coming using actor-network theory (ANT)...

In addition to leadership psychology, there is another journey to understand the context of leadership that takes as its starting point the linguistic turn in the social and the organizational sciences. Those impacted by the linguistic turn are broadly social constructionist, discursive, and more qualitative than mainstream leadership scholars. In...

This article offers a practical theory of leadership grounded in systemic thinking and social constructionism. A systemic constructionist approach conceptualizes leadership as a co-created, performative, attributional, and contextual process where the ideas articulated in talk or action are recognized by others as progressing tasks that are importa...

As Van Dijk (2007) proposed in the first issue of Discourse and Communication , the main purpose of this journal is to bridge the two cross-disciplines of communication and discourse studies. Given this goal, this article sought to help clear the ground for such interdisciplinary development by investigating how organizational researchers use the t...

Organizational discourse is a burgeoning area of study featuring the role of discourse and communication in organizational dynamics. While its rhetorical and literary roots date back to the ancient Greeks (→ Rhetorical Studies), a more recent impetus has been the analysis of professional talk in institutional settings, beginning in the 1970s, and t...

This article examines the role of leadership in mobilizing collective resistance in the workplace. Given the scarcity of dialogue between critical scholars and leadership studies, relatively little consideration is given to the role of leadership in resisting and potentially transforming structures of domination. The article describes some of the r...

Discursive Leadership: In Conversation with Leadership Psychology presents a new, groundbreaking way for scholars and graduate students to examine and explore leadership. Differing from a psychological approach to leadership which tries to get inside the heads of leaders and employees, author Gail Fairhurst focuses on the social or communicative as...

In this article we examine the relationship between discourse and organization. It is a relationship of growing interest in the communication literature as organizations are increasingly framed as discursive constructions. However, such framing appears subject to at least 3 interpretations. First, an organization may be cast as an already formed ob...

This article offers three explanations for why some leaders embrace the skill of framing and others struggle with it. The first explanation draws from philosophical arguments in social constructionism over relativism, essentialism, and agency to draw boundaries around that which is open to framing and that which is not. The second explanation draws...

This article examines how communication contributes to the achievement of spatio-temporal closures through the interactional enactment of sequences called ‘schemata.’ Human and nonhuman interactants not only bring into being but also contribute to the opening, development and closing of organizational sequences, which constitute and circumscribe wh...

This article examines the role of textuality and agency in organizational interaction analysis. Six genres of interaction analysis research are reviewed, some of which address the question of how organizations are discursively constituted. Although interaction analysts agree on the role of discourse/text in the constitution of organizations, no suc...

In this study, the authors explore the idea that organizations perform in contradictory ways because they must satisfy contradictory expectations. The authors present a case study of three successive downsizings within a single organization, the last two of which involved contradictory downsizing strategies. These included a voluntary-involuntary d...

The work of James Taylor and his colleagues offers a promising alternative for changing the ways in which the communication‐organization relationship has been conceived. They eschew traditional container and production metaphors and posit an equivalency relationship, a radical turn that suggests that communication and organization are the same phen...

The purpose of this study was to identify and test the influences that lead individuals to actively manage the meaning of a company Mission Statement. Communication about a company Mission Statement was hypothesized to be a function of an individual's information environment, level of work unit commitment, trust in management, and organizational ro...

Using a longitudinal lab design, the evolving nature of control strategies enacted by managers in responding to poor performing subordinates was examined from both the manager′s and the subordinate′s perspective. Control strategies, characterized by the manager′s use of corrective actions and verbal influence tactics, were found to be somewhat rela...

Borrowing from population ecology, this study examined the potential effects of organizational inertia on the implementation of a socio-technical systems (STS) philosophy in five manufacturing plants. Plant history (conversion from a hierarchical system as opposed to STS from start-up) and plant manager style (autocratic as opposed to participative...

Contemporary political leadership is often said to be visionary and charismatic, but do we really know what is meant by these terms? Do the politicians who utilize strategies of vision and charisma understand the relationship between the two, and do they understand how visionary leadership facilitates the dynamic process of change? We provide illum...

This study takes as problematic the communicatively constructed nature of Leader‐Member Exchange (LMX) and gender. Actual, routine work conversations for six female leaders and their 16 male and female members were analyzed using a case comparison method. Constant comparison of conversations produced 12 discourse patterns that successfully discrimi...

Using the routine work conversations from Fairhurst, an analysis of the jargon and themes of the total quality (TQ) and high commitment work systems (HCWS) visions was conducted. The juxtaposition of the linguistic references of both visions revealed a gap in TQ. In this commentary, we explore the implications of this gap and how it may be related...

This research describes a case study of an organization that recently began implementing Deming's Total Quality (TQ). Using discourse analysis, routine work conversations between leaders and members in five manufacturing plants were analyzed in terms of the framing devices used in implementing the TQ vision. This study found five framing devices: C...

The research reported here compared actual communication of managers and subordinates in two plants, one organized by an organic, self-managing team philosophy and one by mechanistic, authority-based philosophy. Using a relational control coding scheme to analyze and compare interactions, we found that the use of a variety of question and answer co...

The investigation reported here was designed to examine how one leader and three members display social structure through their use of power and social distance language forms. Specifically, this work extends initial research into the simultaneous operation of Leader‐Member Exchange and Average Leadership Style models, by showing how some conversat...

This study examined 84 bank branch managers' actions in controlling ineffective performance. Through structured interviews about a specific, poor performing subordinate, descriptions of sequences of actions, problem duration, number of episodes, guidance sought by managers, managers' perceptions of the situation, outcomes of the performance problem...

PersuasionBostrom, R. N. (1983). Persuasion. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc.Persuasion and human actionSmith, M. J. (1982). Persuasion and Human Action. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co.Persuasion: Theory and contextReardon, K. K. (1981). Persuasion: Theory and Context. Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, Inc...

The purpose of this research was to test the applicability of Kanter's theory of tokenism to male nursing students. Kanter's theory states that numerical underrepresentation, not cultural factors, causes tokens to experience greater performance pressure, social isolation, and role entrapment. Subjects were 322 male and female nursing students from...

The purpose of this study was to describe the use of face support in managerial communication on controlling poor performance. Face support was defined according to the degree of approval (positive face) and the degree of freedom given to poor performers to define a course of action (autonomy). Seventy bank branch managers were interviewed about a...

Kanter's theory of numerical imbalance states that the successful integration of an organizational member whose social category (e.g., sex, race) is different from the workgroup majority is an inverse function of the degree of imbalance in the numerical proportion of majority to minority members. This paper challenges this stand, arguing that indiv...

A study was conducted to examine the face support and control moves that occur in a manager's communication to a poorly performing subordinate over the sequence of his or her violation. Face support was defined according to the degree of approval (positive face) and the degree of freedom (autonomy) given to the poor performers to define a course of...

The research reported here tested McPhee's dual focus model of message‐attitude‐behavior relations. McPhee's first focus was to reject Fishbein's enduring internal construct criterion by demonstrating that variables lacking cross situational predictive power can significantly add to the explanatory power of a model. This research found that persona...

This paper points out that the available research on communication rules tends to be descriptive (or humanistic) in nature and characterized by a conspicuous absence of prediction along with experimental methods and parametric interpretations of social behavior. The paper first argues that current scientific methodology is consistent with a humanis...