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Conceptualizing communicative leadership: A framework for analysing and developing leaders' communication competence
Abstract
Purpose
– The concept of “communicative leadership” is used in organisations that analyse and develop leaders' communication competence. A scholarly definition of this concept is lacking, and the implications of leaders' communication and the development of communication competence for organisations are rarely discussed. The purpose of this paper is to create a theoretical framework around the concept of “communicative leadership”, which can contribute to future research and development of leaders' communication competence.
Design/methodology/approach
– Three research questions were addressed: what communicative behaviours are central to leaders? How can “communicative leaders” be characterised? What is a “communicative leader”? Literature from the leadership and communication research fields was reviewed and related to these questions.
Findings
– Four central communicative behaviours of leaders (i.e. structuring, facilitating, relating, and representing), eight principles of communicative leadership, and a tentative definition are presented. A communicative leader is defined as someone who engages employees in dialogue, actively shares and seeks feedback, practices participative decision making, and is perceived as open and involved.
Practical implications
– A theoretical foundation to the practice of analysing and developing leaders' communication competence is provided, which is related to employee engagement and organisational performance.
Originality/value
– Communicative leadership is a concept emerging from organisational needs, articulated by corporate and public organisation leaders. This article links its core constructs to academic quantitative and qualitative research in an integrated framework, which can guide further research and the development of leaders' communication competence.
... Overall, communicative leadership has been shown to positively impact employee engagement (Madsen, 2020) as well as employee well-being (Bäckström et al., 2016). Bäckström et al. (2016) found that leaders who practice the communicative behaviours indicated by Johansson et al. (2014) can have a positive influence on their coworkers' well-being and overall working environment. However, Bäckström et al. (2016) only investigated communicative leadership from the managers' point of view. ...
... Because it is currently not outlined in any of Johansson et al.'s (2014) behaviours of communicative leadership, we propose adding "(high) responsiveness" as another practice of the second communicative leadership behaviour (facilitating work). The idea of responsive communication might be newly important due to the recent shift to flexible working, in which collaborating, and coordinating have become more challenging (Hunter, 2019). ...
Due to the global coronavirus pandemic, there has been a rise in flexible working, such as remote and hybrid working. This has brought new challenges for leaders and managers, who must now master both online and offline ways of communicating and leading. Drawing on leadership communication theories, as well as extant research on communication channels, employee engagement, and flexible working, this study aims to explore which aspects and tools of leadership communication millennial employees perceive as engaging in today's shift to new ways of working. To answer this question, 10 semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with millennial employees working in various European countries. Findings show that millennial employees find face-to-face leadership communication (both online and offline), transparency of information, empathic leadership, and the effective use of communication channels and tools, most engaging. Theoretical and practical implications as well as suggestions for future research are also discussed.
... So, this study has been designed to address the gaps that exist in the literature of managerial coaching. Moreover, a lot of studies have also revealed that the coaching practice in the workplace show that the management ability to appropriately acts as a coach and also managing autonomy support in order to design and administer managerial coaching may have a substantial impact on the internal motivation of employees (Johansson, et al., 2014). So, we can take internal motivation from a perspective of training management and that is "self-efficacy" as an important predictor of commitment and the outcomes of coaching. ...
... In the model of organizational coaching, numerous scholars believe that the concepts of autonomy support, employee's motivation and coaching are interconnected. This can explain that the belief of employees and confidence in their abilities of transferring what they have learned so far from supervisor or trainings (Johansson, et al., 2014). Self-efficacy also plays a role between coaching and the outcomes of coaching. ...
The study at hand is aimed at finding the factors that affect the intention of customers to adopt m-commerce for their routine behavior. We measured how trust, brand equity, and social influence affect the “intention to adopt m-commerce”. The data was collected from consumers which were part of the University of Punjab and have mobile for use in social and commercial activities. The results reveal that we can use m-commerce for different activities and trust and brand equity affect on it. Social influence mediates the relationship between trust, brand equity, and dependent variables. Future directions are given.
... So, this study has been designed to address the gaps that exist in the literature of managerial coaching. Moreover, a lot of studies have also revealed that the coaching practice in the workplace show that the management ability to appropriately acts as a coach and also managing autonomy support in order to design and administer managerial coaching may have a substantial impact on the internal motivation of employees (Johansson, et al., 2014). So, we can take internal motivation from a perspective of training management and that is "self-efficacy" as an important predictor of commitment and the outcomes of coaching. ...
... In the model of organizational coaching, numerous scholars believe that the concepts of autonomy support, employee's motivation and coaching are interconnected. This can explain that the belief of employees and confidence in their abilities of transferring what they have learned so far from supervisor or trainings (Johansson, et al., 2014). Self-efficacy also plays a role between coaching and the outcomes of coaching. ...
The purpose of this study is to examine the managerial coaching effects on innovative work behaviors. Previous evidence shows the popularity of managerial coaching in organizations and the outcomes. Despite all the popularity, there is still a lot to study and investigate. This study investigates the mediating role of affective supervisory commitment between managerial coaching and innovative work behaviors. Moreover, the moderating role of self-efficacy was also tested between affective supervisory commitment and innovative work behaviors. Social exchange and Leader-member exchange theories were used in this study. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to analyze the model fitness and the SEM technique was also used to examine the hypotheses of the study. The study revealed the positive and significant relationship of managerial coaching with affective supervisory commitment and innovative work behaviors. The mediating effect was also found to be positive and significant. Furthermore, the moderating role of self-efficacy was also found to strengthen the relationship between affective supervisory commitment and innovative work behaviors. This study gives complete empirical support to affective supervisory commitment to have a strong effect on organizations and how self-efficacy strengthens employees’ innovative work behaviors.
... Addressee-related communication is a core element in decision-making processes and is indispensable for decision makers. As Johansson, Miller, and Hamrin state, "leading others without communicating seems virtually impossible" [42] (p. 148). ...
Citation: Eberz, S.; Lang, S.; Breitenmoser, P.; Niebert, K. Taking the Lead into Sustainability: Decision Makers' Competencies for a Greener Future Sustainability 2023, 15, 4986. Abstract: Many research articles describe competencies that people need in order to think, develop, and enact a sustainable future. Based on findings from the political economy, this paper argues that it is the macroscopic decisions in the public sphere that have an impact on society and the environment. Therefore, decision makers in the economy, politics, and civil society are important actors to enable a societal transformation towards sustainability by making macroscopic decisions. Based on these assumptions, this empirical research article analyzes the competencies decision makers such as ministers, CEOs, or union leaders need to contribute to a sustainable future in their professional life. We conducted interviews with 14 high-level decision makers and analyzed their competencies based on Wiek et al.'s framework on sustainability competencies. The findings show how they enact and organize the competencies needed for steering the sustainable transition. Linking all competencies is particularly important, especially at the intersection of different systems, to develop a macroscale, system-oriented decision. The authors suggest to consider systems and interpersonal thinking as extremely interdisciplinary competencies and to put a focus on public-sphere actions when educating future leaders. Moreover, the results indicate that dealing with uncertainty, following one's own values, and building up resilience play a major role for decision makers.
... Mahathir is also known for his excellent communication skills, which are essential for leaders. According to Johansson, Miller, & Hamrin (2014), leaders should be able to communicate effectively as communication, whether verbal, written, or behavioural, allows both leaders and followers to understand one another while helping the former to gain influence over the latter. In this regard, Mahathir had used the space to communicate with the people as effectively as possible. ...
Mahathir Mohamad's leadership as the Prime Minister of Malaysia is an example of excellent leadership. His stint is peculiar as he is the longest-serving leader in the world and the oldest Prime Minister to ever lead a country. The impact of his leadership establishes his reputation as an outstanding leader as supported by the Great Man Theory of Leadership. As an effort to comprehend his leadership excellence, this study examined Mahathir's leadership through the lens of the Great Man Theory of Leadership, which elevates leadership based on extraordinary achievements and considers the leader to be born a leader. The research was conducted by using a narrative review approach. Data were gathered qualitatively using thematic analysis, from secondary sources including academic journals, dissertations, books, and published articles pertaining to the topic of Mahathir's leadership. The results found that his leadership approach is indeed aligned with the underlying elements of the Great Man Theory of Leadership, namely charismatic, intelligent, politically skilled, and wise. Past studies reported that Mahathir possesses the quality of being visionary, trustworthy, authentic, resourceful, pragmatic, people-oriented, good communication skills, highly ethical, and core value-based, thus strengthening his premise as an outstanding leader. His excellence in leading the country has been proven beneficial to both Malaysia and its people while the attention that he received from the international community further reinforced his relevance and influence at both the local and international levels. It is indeed a pride for Malaysia as a Southeast Asia country to have a world-class leader.
... From a meaning-centred perspective, communicative leadership as a theoretical concept is a social construction co-created in interactions among employees and between managers and employees (Johansson et al., 2014;Madsen, 2020). This co-construction becomes visible as dialogues between organisational members in internal social media as 'communication arenas'. ...
Digital transformation has become a research focus in recent years. Likewise, internal communication (IC) is one of the fastest‐growing specialisations in public relations and communication management. This research explores digital internal communication (DIC) at the nexus between digital transformation and IC. We provide an integrative review of the literature; our thematic analysis of selected journal articles and other scholarly texts is guided by the concept of organisations as socio‐technical systems. Furthermore, we create a template using NVivo software to organise the emerging themes and clusters following the logic of communication levels. This template allows us to explain the phenomenon of DIC in a socio‐technical organisational system and discuss how the emerging themes are interrelated, people‐focused, and linked to competency development and trust‐building. As a contribution to theory, we offer a conceptual model which illustrates the dynamics of DIC as an interplay of socio‐technical elements on three communication levels. This conceptual model can be further developed in scholarly discussions on DIC and by organisations reflecting on their IC use in a digital workplace environment.
... Moreover, a knowledge leader as a motivator, coach, and mentor influences cultural and organizational change roles in the human relations model, aiming to foster social capital and stimulate their followers to share knowledge (Zhang & Cheng, 2015;Ferinia, 2015). A knowledge leader as a communicative leader is also defined as someone who engages employees in dialogue, actively shares and seeks feedback, practices participative decision-making, and is perceived as open and involved (Johansson, Miller & Hamrin, 2014). More specifically, a knowledge leader as a change agent is "the one who indicates how to go" and strongly influences how the company adapts to changes (Bertoldi et al., 2018). ...
This paper aims to synthesize findings drawn from studies on knowledge leadership to identify the key trend of research in the knowledge management literature over the past two decades. A systematic literature review was performed over a data set of 149 related studies published in the international journals indexed by the WoS, SCOPUS, ProQuest, Google Scholar, Emerald Insight, and Elsevier databases between 2001 and 2021. The findings conceptualized the nature of “knowledge leadership” and revealed six core themes focusing on multiple leadership styles, knowledge leadership for learning, effective KM leadership, leader-member exchange, and customer knowledge leadership. Additionally, the content analysis revealed the importance of knowledge leaders being more transformational, distributed, empowering, and visionary. It has been widely reported that transformational leadership is a significant driver of knowledge management practices in the organization. This study provides an integrated picture of effective knowledge leadership for managers and practitioners that significantly depends on a paradigm shift from hierarchical structures and traditional models of leadership to the use of shared, distributed, and networking leadership. Given this increasing interest in studying the role of leadership in KM, it is interesting to investigate the research trend of knowledge leadership in the KM literature.
... Some studies concentrated on organisational listening by involving the concept of dialogue in organisational communication. For example, Johansson et al. (2014) found that effective two-way leadership communication provides opportunities for dialogue in an organisation. In detail, leaders with good communication ability are more likely to listen to the employees, and handle employee relations in proper ways; in a nutshell, they are good listeners (De Janasz et al., 2009). ...
Job engagement is defined as one's enthusiasm and involvement in his or her job. Individuals who are profoundly engaged with their job are motivated by the work itself. They will, in general, work harder and more productively than others and are bound to create the outcomes that their clients and organisation need. Although existing empirical studies have provided evidence that perceived organisational support (POS) and supportive leader behaviour can significantly predict job engagement, the effect of organisational listening on employee job engagement is still under researched. Guided by the Job Demand-Resources (JD-R) model, this study proposed that organisational listening is a vital predictor of job engagement. We analysed whether organisational listening holds a more substantial statistical power than perceived organisational support and supportive leader behaviour as job resources. We conducted an online survey that involved 207 employees from a Malaysian IT management consulting company. After analysing the survey data through multiple regression analysis, the results showed that organisational listening was a significant predictor of job engagement. Besides, organisational listening showed an incremental validity above and beyond perceived organisational support and supportive leader behaviour in predicting job engagement. These findings suggest that employees become engaged in their job when they believe that the leader incorporates values and action to listen accurately and is supportive. Implications in theoretical and practical perspectives were discussed.
The study investigates the impact of internal marketing philosophy on implementing strategic goals to leverage an innovative internal marketing concept for business growth. In the context of firms’ strategic orientation, the organization’s development, market position, and practices used to promote the desired organizational behavior are being examined. The paper focuses on large companies in Greece, which belong to the retail, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors. Moreover, these companies have been certified by “Great place to work.” A qualitative method via Nvivo software was used. Data were collected from 10 semi-structured interviews. Participants are executives with significant working experience and different managerial positions. The findings document the impact of the internal marketing concept on company development through policies concerning strengthening the organization’s presence and recruiting qualified employees. Moreover, the influence of the internal marketing concept on an organization’s market position with regard to a positive working environment and management style is highlighted. Finally, team environment emerges as a dominant trait in the organizational context, while values such as honesty, integrity, and reliability appear as critical features of the desired behavior. The study provides an updated managerial perspective by establishing a link between the theory of internal marketing and business process mapping. The results enable executives to focus on elements that better serve the implementation of strategic goals.
Hotels have experienced competitive pressures, customer preferences and unpredictable economic changes on account of challenges linked to the pandemic. In view of these changes, the hotel industry has been forced to adopt new strategies, resulting in a diverge execution and performance, in order to stay afloat. This has necessitated hotel managers to indulge in innovative entrepreneurship decisions and new approaches to sustain their businesses. This chapter examines the innovative entrepreneurship environment in the Cyprus hotel industry. Consideration is given to managers’ ability, skills and ingenuity to operate during the hard times brought about by the pandemic. Research findings from semi-structured interviews with hotel managers reveal the use of soft and hard skills to bring about innovation. The selected hotels have been able to create organisational cultures that are atypical for Cyprus standards. In this respect, novel entrepreneurship practices have supported business optimisation during the economic crises.
The use of self-managing work teams (SMWTs) has increased dramatically in the last decade. Despite this increase, the question of how to effectively lead SMWTs remains unanswered. This paper presents an inductive grounded theory building study that incorporates multiple sources of information from the respective constituents, i.e., the external team leader, the team members, and senior management. More specifically, the research questions asked about: 1) the behaviors commonly used by external leaders as they carry out their role, 2) how, when, and why they engage in specific behaviors, and 3) the link between specific leader behavior and team effectiveness. To answer these questions two research methodologies were blended: the comparative case study method and grounded theory. In doing so, we were able to determine empirically the leadership behaviors exhibited by external leaders of SMWTs that most support multidimensional leader effectiveness. A conceptual model of the full leadership process is presented. It suggests that the external leader role exists on the boundary between the broader organization and the teams for which the leader is held responsible. Further, the model suggests that there are 13 behaviors that define the leadership role. These fall into four clusters: relating, scouting, persuading, and empowering. Twelve of these behaviors representing all four dimensions were found to support superior leadership performance. Findings also suggest that behaviors involved in supporting team self-management and external boundary management are the most critical to leader success.
To date, the research designed to test a leading theory of intrinsic motivation. Cognitive Evaluation Theory (Deci, 1975), has made little attempt to explore variables related to the communication process when individuals receive positive verbal feedback. Also, because the theory fails to specify when the reward aspects of either control or information will be more salient, the phenomenological nature of positive verbal feedback remains unclear. This paper explores certain variables relevant to the communication process and the administration of feedback messages when utilized as independent variables and offers a propositional extension to the theory. The feedback process involves at least four essential elements: (1) relational/message characteristics, (2) a feedback channel, (3) a feedback source, and (4) the recipient of the feedback. The 16 propositions and 5 related constructs derived suggest that positive verbal feedback can be salient on the control dimension and therefore negatively affect intrinsic motivation. In addition, numerous constructs not previously considered that influence the way positive verbal feedback is communicated may either enhance or diminish intrinsic motivation by influencing a receiver's feelings of competence and self-determination. This analysis provides a set of research priorities for studying the role of feedback in the intrinsic motivation process.
This paper demonstrates how change recipient sensemaking contributes to the unpredictable and emergent nature of strategic change. It reports on a longitudinal, real-time case study of planned change implementation within the core business division of an organisation undergoing transition. The study focuses on the processes of interaction that occur between change recipients as they try to make sense of the various change interventions put in place. It shows how the interpretations recipients develop of the change initiatives as a result of this interaction leads to both intended and unintended change outcomes as implementation progresses. As such, the research provides an explanation for a phenomenon well documented by other research -- the tendency for intended strategies to lead to unintended consequences. However, the research is also able to provide evidence of, and detail on, the processes of interaction identified by other research as important in the creation of new shared understandings at times of change, but which are as yet under explored. The findings have implications for future research and challenge the way we conceive of change management.
