Abstract
Research on sensemaking in organisations and on linguistic relativity suggests that speakers of the same language may use this language in different ways to construct social realities at work. We apply a semantic theory of survey response (STSR) to explore such differences in quantitative survey research. Using text analysis algorithms, we have studied how language from three media domains–the business press, PR Newswire and general newspapers–has differential explanatory value for analysing survey responses in leadership research. We projected well-known surveys measuring leadership, motivation and outcomes into large text samples from these three media domains significantly different impacts on survey responses. Business press language was best in explaining leadership-related items, PR language best at explaining organizational results and “ordinary” newspaper language seemed to explain the relationship among motivation items. These findings shed light on how different public arenas construct organizational realities in different ways, and how these differences have consequences on methodology in research on leadership.
Highlights
Where–and how–does the language we use to describe leadership and organizations emerge? Language is neither given by nature nor static, but reflect continuous cultural developments [1,2,3]
What we have argued so far is that: a) central concepts in Organisational Behaviour (OB) are semantic constructions; b) these semantic constructions are subject to sensemaking and linguistic relativity; c) survey responses are dependent on the semantic habits of the respondents; and that d) semantic text algorithms may be differentially sensitive to language as used in different types of social discourse
The Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) residuals were no longer correlated with MI, only faintly correlated with the observed survey responses, and their mutual correlations were reduced
Summary
Where–and how–does the language we use to describe leadership and organizations emerge? Language is neither given by nature nor static, but reflect continuous cultural developments [1,2,3]. Language is the primary tool by which humans construct social realities [4,5,6]. This is true for the everyday language of ordinary people, and for communities of professional practitioners such as scientists [7,8,9,10] and managers [11,12,13,14,15]. Language related to leadership is probably shaped by managers themselves through communities of practice [20,21] since rhetorical skills are important in leadership practice [21,22,23,24]. A third important community of language users are employees or followers, who may hold different ideas about leadership from their superiors but who need to engage in sensemaking about leadership as they are affected by it [25,26,27,28,29,30]
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