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.

Globalization promises a world without boundaries that will increasingly necessitate the exchange of international and intercultural business communication. In this globalization process, a significant proportion of future economic growth (and the exchange of messages associated with this development) is projected to be centered in Asia, with a shift in such growth and power away from the United States and Europe. Following Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, mainland China and, to a lesser extent, India are moving to upscale positions on value-added chains in global industries. New major Asian players (e.g., countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) are replacing the United States and Europe, who are taking on downscale positions. In addition, the Middle East, because of global dependence on it for oil, is a critical player in international business. With this shift in global trading patterns, we must focus on Asia in order to gain an up-to-date understanding of business communication in global contexts. But previous research and theory have been directed toward business communication in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe.

Past research in intercultural business communication has laid a partial foundation for explaining Asian business communication. Asians are classified as high-context communicators and speak English in intercultural communication. Nevertheless, the relationship of language and culture on communication behaviors has remained unclear. To address this gap in the research, this study compares the communication behaviors of business professionals from two prominent Asian cultures—Japanese and Hong Kong Chinese—when these professionals participate in intercultural and intracultural decision-making meetings. The study reveals some differences in communication behaviors between the two cultural groups in both the intracultural and the intercultural meetings. Although both groups generally reflected their high-context communication orientations, they exhibited some deviations from the general discourse patterns, especially in the ways in which they expressed disagreements.