A deontic perspective on the collaborative, multimodal accomplishment of leadership

Abstract

This article makes a case for investigating leadership from a micro-interactional perspective which integrates discursive, sequential and multimodal analytical layers. It thus builds on existing discursive leadership research by demonstrating that leadership is not achieved only through talk, but by means of a complex interplay between verbal and non-verbal resources. Focusing on video-recordings of authentic meetings, I investigate the interactional interplay between the superior, the meeting chair and the other participants by means of a deontic perspective. Drawing on the status–stance distinction and teasing out how proximal and distal deontic rights are enacted and how these relate to leader and follower identities when conceptualized from a social constructionist perspective, I demonstrate that leadership is an essentially collaborative accomplishment in which all participants play a crucial role. Finally, I argue that this can only be uncovered fully when attention is paid to the variety of means – verbal as well as non-verbal – that interlocutors have at their disposal when attempting to influence each other towards achieving organizationally relevant goals.