International Journal of Business Communication

Much has been written about the nature of leadership communication; however, the linkage often is limited to a view of communication as a strategic mechanism—or technique—to be employed by leaders in efforts to achieve specific purposes. This limited conceptualization of leadership communication does not fully capture the pervasive role of communication, and it fails to provide a nuanced view of the role communication plays in organizational dynamics, and in business settings, in particular. This article begins with an overview of various dichotomies raised in the leadership literature that have tended to impede rather than advance our understanding. We then discuss the evolution of thinking about communication and conclude with a discussion of several principles that can enhance contemporary organizational and business communication theory and practice.

This study examines the extent to which the leaders of business schools engage with Twitter to reach diverse audiences, the possible links between Twitter usage and the ranking of the Dean’s respective business college, and the linguistic/stylistic approaches adopted. We employed sentiment analysis to examine the linguistic approaches among the various tweets from the Dean’s account. The findings of the study suggest speaking at stakeholders from a public microblog may not be the most effective way to connect with them. Notwithstanding, biological and cognitive constraints limit the economy of attention and relationships in an online world.

As environmental change accelerates and future uncertainty increases, implementation of strategy inherently involves continuous adjustment and modification. To meet the need for further research on the critical role of communication, this article contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between communication and strategy implementation. I propose that senders’ bias, which refers to the overestimation of the quality of communication (i.e., degree of sharing) with organizational members by senders (i.e., top managers), is a fundamental implementation problem. Thus, top managers’ perceived degree of communication with organizational members is expected to have limited effects on the degree of value sharing and resulting effectiveness of strategy implementation up to a certain threshold point. Additionally, I argue that the relationship between top managers’ perceived degree of communication and strategy implementation are moderated by the type of communication (i.e., whether storytelling is used in the communication), communication medium (i.e., the use of e-mails), and top managers’ openness to the voices of organizational members. The idea of senders’ bias should provide insights into why many organizations struggle with strategy implementation.

Motivating language theory (Sullivan, 1988) is a leadership communication theory focused on the strategic use of leader oral language. Walk and talk alignment is a main pillar of motivating language theory. As such, within the field of educational leadership, we hypothesize that behavioral integrity and credibility are required in order for motivating language to occur. In this study, a survey was administered to teachers, from 2011 to 2014, at a Title I elementary school to gauge the motivating language use of the principal. We empirically tested the ability of behavioral integrity (Simons, 1999, 2008) and credibility (McCroskey & Teven, 1999) to predict the principal’s motivating language use. There were statistically significant correlations between behavioral integrity and motivating language, credibility and motivating language, and between behavioral integrity and credibility. In each year, behavioral integrity and credibility contributed significantly to the predication of the principal’s motivating language use. Behavioral integrity and credibility are integral to a leader’s use of motivating language. We discuss the results and implications for employees and organizations, along with ideas for future research.

In Asia, the English language serves as a lingua franca to connect people from various backgrounds for managerial synergy. In this study, we investigate leadership in a setting where English as lingua franca is used among Asian business professionals. Employing the notion of discourse, we use quantitative and qualitative analyses to identify how leadership emerges in meetings with multicultural participants, and how different types of leadership affect these decision-making meetings. We conclude that linguistic and contextual factors discursively construct different styles of leadership, and that these leadership styles lead to starkly different team outcomes. The overall result indicates that a business meeting is not a logical process leading to a rational decision, but rather an organic mix of contextual, linguistic, and leadership factors when English as lingua franca is used in multicultural participants.