Who Wants to Be the Leader? The Linguistic Construction of Emerging Leadership in Differently Gendered Teams

Abstract

Increasingly, scholars are contesting the value of grand theories of leadership in favor of a social constructionist or “discursive” approach that posits the centrality of language for “doing” leadership. This article investigates whether the linguistic enactment of leadership varies according to the gender composition of the team, a feature that may have consequences for the career progression of women business leaders. Within the context of a U.K.-based study of three leadership teams (men only, women only, and mixed gender), I use an interactional sociolinguistic framework to analyze what leadership “looks and sounds like” as it emerges during the course of a competitive team task. My findings show that the linguistic construction of leadership varies considerably within each team, although not in conventionally gendered ways. The study also offers feminist linguistic insights on the business issue of why so few women progress from middle management to senior leadership roles.