Professional talk is filled with stories and reflections of professional practice. In the case of migrant doctors, in particular, professional talk often involves some degree of conflict talk as their reflections centre on their difficulties to adjust to the new workplace culture (Lazzaro-Salazar & Pujol-Cols, 2019). In this light, the leadership styles of migrant doctors play a vital role in the ways they manage those challenges, and leadership discourses often take central stage when they narrate decision-making processes of problematic workplace situations.
In this context, this study explores leadership discourses in interview data collected with over 40 migrant doctors in Chile across the country (namely, Antofagasta in the North, Maule in the centre and Magallanes in the South) between 2016 and 2020. While the interviews were mainly designed to get doctors to reflect on the conflicts of intercultural communication they face at work with fellow local doctors, they often (voluntarily) reflected on their relationship with patients and compared their practices to those of local doctors where their leadership skills surfaced as a way to explain how they deal with different problematic situations at work.
Drawing on ideas of discursive leadership (Fairhurst 2007), coaching theory (Hicks 2013) and an integrative discourse analytic framework (e.g., Graf & Jautz 2022), we analyse these interviews and present a taxonomy of leadership discourses of migrant doctors in Chile for front-stage (i.e. doctor-patient) and back-stage (i.e. doctor-doctor) situations. We discuss the ways in which these discourses display complex self-positionings and underpin migrant doctors' professional beliefs and values, medical ideologies and understandings of their role as care providers. A special focus will be on the participants' coaching leadership style, i.e. practices that may enable learning and development, a communication at eye level amongst the communicative partners (cf. Jautz & Graf in prep.). The study contributes to advancing our understanding of leadership in the professions in migrant contexts from a sociolinguistic perspective and suggests possible applications of this kind of research into medical practice and beyond.
References:
Fairhurst, G. (2007). Discursive leadership: In conversation with leadership psychology. Los Angeles: Sage.
Graf, E.-M. & Jautz, S. (2022). Working alliance and client design as discursive achievements in first sessions of executive coaching. In: Scarvaglieri, C., Graf, E.-M. & T. Spranz-Fogasy (eds.). Practices of Relationship Management in Organized Helping – Analyzing Interaction in
Psychotherapy, Medical Encounters, Coaching and in Social Media (pp. 171-193). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hicks, R. (2013). Coaching as a Leadership Style. The Art and Science of Coaching Conversations for Healthcare Professionals. New York: Routledge.
Jautz, S. & Graf, E.-M. (in prep.). Establishing and processing communication at eye level in first sessions in coaching.
Lazzaro-Salazar, M. and Pujol Cols, L. (2019). Conflict in migrant doctor-local doctor communication in public healthcare institutions in Chile. Communication and Medicine, 16(1): 1-14.
