Bertha Du-Babcock

Leadership Construction in Intra-Asian English as Lingua Franca Decision-Making Meetings:

In Asia, the English language serves as a lingua franca to connect people from various backgrounds for managerial synergy. In this study, we investigate leadership in a setting where English as lingua franca is used among Asian business professionals. Employing the notion of discourse, we use quantitative and qualitative analyses to identify how leadership emerges in meetings with multicultural participants, and how different types of leadership affect these decision-making meetings. We conclude that linguistic and contextual factors discursively construct different styles of leadership, and that these leadership styles lead to starkly different team outcomes. The overall result indicates that a business meeting is not a logical process leading to a rational decision, but rather an organic mix of contextual, linguistic, and leadership factors when English as lingua franca is used in multicultural participants.

Negotiating consensus in simulated decision-making meetings without designated chairs: A study of participants’ discourse roles:

Decision-making is an integral part of business meetings in an organization. Research has suggested that a participant’s engagement in the decision-making process has direct relevance to his or her role(s) in the team or organization. This study extends the investigation of communicative behavior in decision-making to a special meeting setting where all participants assume similar organizational roles and where there is no designated chair. In particular, it draws on conversation analytic methods and a recently developed framework of participant roles to examine discursive strategies and discourse roles on a moment-by-moment basis in the process of consensus negotiation. Findings show that participants’ choices of discursive strategies and the display of discourse roles vary as the discussion proceeds. A limited range of discursive strategies and discourse roles are identified when the discussion fails to lead to consensus. Our analysis also suggests that certain discourse roles appear to have a greater impact on reaching consensus decisions.