In the post-bureaucratic era of work, project-based work has become common in many organizations, resulting in changes in leadership identities. The projects are dependent on self-organizing teams and team leaders, whose work is to ensure that organizational goals are implemented successfully. (Räisänen & Linde, 2004) For facilitating such work, group leaders may use a variety of digital platforms to support and manage project management processes (e.g. Darics, 2017). In our study, we take a discursive perspective to leadership in such an organizational context. Using the concept of deontic authority (see, Stevanovic & Peräkylä; Van De Mieroop, 2020), we look at how a team leader caught between the team and upper management manages their role in episodes where decision-making is discussed with the team.
We use authentic recordings of naturally occurring meeting data from a project promoting organizational change in a Finnish white-collar company. The data consist of video-recordings of both face-to-face and digital workshops and material from a digital platform used in the project. We are particularly interested in meetings in which the team leader discusses upcoming, ongoing or finalized decisions with the team members. Drawing on qualitative micro-oriented research methods from conversation and discourse analysis, we discuss fragments in which the group leader either presents herself as a follower in relation to the decision that is communicated, or as a co-leader who contributed significantly to the decision-making process.
We found that shared laughter is an important resource in this process, and that it takes the form of laughing at a third party, in particular the project leader's group. The results show how the team leader manages to pursue laughter from team members to get their attention, after which she cuts off the laughter and moves quickly back to serious talk. The digital platform can be utilized for both pursuing the laughter and cutting it off. Through shared laughter, an ingroup identity is constructed, and the group leader's identity is protected from criticisms when the leader did not contribute to the decision-making process. Finally, we argue that the highly ambivalent and implicit nature of the laughables is emblematic of the complex balancing act the group leader has to engage in with regard to her deontic rights within this highly complex leadership constellation.
References
Darics, E. (2017). E-Leadership or "How to Be Boss in Instant Messaging?" The Role of Nonverbal Communication. International Journal of Business Communication 57(1), 3–29.
Räisänen, C. & Linde, A. (2004). Technologizing Discourse to Standardize Projects in MultiProject Organizations: Hegemony by Consensus? Organization 11(1), 101–121.
Stevanovic, M. & Peräkylä, A. (2012). Deontic authority in interaction: The right to announce, propose and decide. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45(3), 297-321.
Van De Mieroop, D. (2020). A deontic perspective on the collaborative, multimodal accomplishment of leadership. Leadership, 16(5), 592-61
