Following the Leader: An Analysis of Leadership and Conformity in Business Meetings

Hyun Woo Kim; Bertha Du-Babcock; Hyejung Chang

doi:10.1109/tpc.2020.3032052

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication Dec 2020

Following the Leader: An Analysis of Leadership and Conformity in Business Meetings

Hyun Woo Kim Pennsylvania State University ; Bertha Du-Babcock Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages ; Hyejung Chang Kyung Hee University

Abstract

Background: Past research has established the importance of discursive leadership in professional communication, but it has not systematically examined how conformity behaviors emerge as a potentially undesirable consequence of discursive leadership. Literature review: Review of the literature on the centrality of communication in leadership processes and conformity behavior suggest a void of analytic tools to adequately examine the negative consequences of discursive leadership. Research question: Are later interlocutors more likely to speak similarly to earlier ones if the earlier interlocutors occupy a more central position in the conversation network? Methodology: Based on 32,000 words of a transcribed meeting corpus, we measured conformity behaviors using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency scores, which are widely used in the information retrieval setting. We also operationalized the strength of discursive leadership as a positional centrality measure in the conversation network using a matrix algebra approach in social network analysis. Results: Findings support the hypothesis that discursive leadership is associated with conformity in language aligned toward discursive leaders' opinions. Conclusions: This study makes theoretical advances in understanding leadership construction and conformity behaviors between leaders and followers using empirical, authentic meeting data. We also give business people an applied understanding of the process of discursive leadership, which may help them to improve communication efficacy in their organizations by reducing overly conforming behaviors. We recommend that future research include more diverse participants and be combined with a survey to supplement the conversation data.

Journal: IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Published: 2020-12-01
DOI: 10.1109/tpc.2020.3032052
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Open Access: Closed
Topics: professional writing book reviews
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Cited by in this index (1)

Yu (2023)

A Cross-Cultural Genre Analysis of Leadership Statements in Italian and America…

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication

Cites in this index (1)

Du-Babcock et al. (2013)

A Comparison of the Communication Behaviors of Hong Kong Chinese and Japanese B…

Journal of Business and Technical Communication

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Following the Leader: An Analysis of Leadership and Conformity in Business Meetings

Abstract

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