Tun Mahathir Mohamad’s Leadership Communication as the Essence of Social Change: What the Malaysian Hindus’ Opinion Leaders Say?

Abstract

Past transformational leadership communication literature shows that leadership communication from the contextual perspective is still limited. The scenario in Malaysia shows that Tun Mahathir Mohamad is respected for bringing social changes to the society including the Malaysian Hindus, playing the role of a transformational leader. However, some research indicates that Mahathir’s leadership communication merely focused on the majority community (Muslims) and neglected the Malaysian Hindus (minority). Therefore, this research embarks on an investigation to explore whether Mahathir’s leadership communication has brought significant social changes to Malaysian Hindus. It adopts a qualitative research design to describe the phenomenon under study using the purposive sampling method where in-depth interviews were carried out on 23 informants who are the opinion leaders for the Malaysian Hindus. Data analysis of this study is conducted using thematic analysis method and suitable themes were identified. The results of this study discovered that Mahathir Mohamad’s leadership communication skills have stimulated social changes among the Malaysian Hindus where it is evident that Mahathir was a transformational leader who has brought significant and indisputable development to the Hindus including identifying issues pertaining to the Malaysian Hindus. Nevertheless, there are weaknesses found in his leadership communication. Keywords: Transformational leadership communication, social change, opinion leader, Malaysian Hindus, minority.