Exploring Leadership Conceptualisations in Semi-structured Interviews from Multiple Perspectives

Abstract

A key to understanding leadership is to recognise that leadership is itself a conceptualisation drawing on a number of positions, experiences, practices and ideologies. Although many studies present conceptualisations of leadership, they fail to offer accounts of the conceptualisation process itself. In this chapter, I do not identify leadership a priori but offer an account of the leadership conceptualisation process. In doing so, I explore how leadership is conceptualised primarily by U.S. leaders in semi-structured interviews . In my exploration, I investigate the narratives concerning the leadership beliefs and communication experiences of four self-identified male leaders drawn from business, law, non-profit, and academia. These narratives were collected through a process of semi-structured interviews (Grindsted, Journal of Pragmatics 37:1015–1035, 2005) by Skype (audio only), by telephone and face to face. Viewing such research interviews in terms of a social practice generating data co-constructed by the interviewer and interviewee (Talmy Applied Linguistics 32:25–42, 2011), the narratives were then investigated by means of an innovative mixed methods approach involving (U.S. culture influenced) content, narrative and metaphor analyses that included the strategic use of NVivo . The findings include stereotypical notions of leadership, and I conclude that conceptualisations of leadership need to be viewed in the light of their various inputs and from multiple perspectives .