Primacy of the leader, obscuration of followers: The discourse of leadership in the business media

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Highlights

  • The business media engages in the discursive process of leadership discourse.

  • The leadership discourse is leader-centric and market motive driven.

  • The leadership construction places primacy on the leader’s dispositions and agency.

  • The construction does not only place primacy on the leader, it also obscures followers.

Abstract

The study explored the construction of leadership in the business media by focusing on four widely read online business e-magazines. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, a sample of 806 online e-magazine articles published between 2015 and 2018 were systematically studied. The construction does not only grant primacy to the leader, but also it obscures followers and other secondary social actors. The study contributes to existing literature on leadership representation, leadership stakeholders involved in such discursive process, and their routine practices of writing leadership texts that legitimize certain meanings at the expense of others. The paper suggests that such a construction of leadership in the business media impacts both followers’ and aspiring leaders’ perceptions, ultimately limiting what can be envisioned and enacted.

Introduction

How we portray leadership—the participants, its process, and its consequences—has significant implications for leadership practices. Arguably, our everyday portrayal of leadership has a direct bearing on our collective leadership cognition and the constructs, which in turn, impacts our routine actions and their representations. For example, micro activities such as voting and hiring are significantly impacted by the view of leadership voters and employers hold (Spector, 2016). Similarly, on the academic front, the meaning we make of leadership has implication for understanding the “knowledge principle” that undergirds studying the field and practice (Ospina and Schall, 2001).

One avenue that reveals perceptions of leadership is the media. Both the general and industry-specific media addresses the topic of leadership in diverse ways when they report on politicians, business leaders, sports leaders, and conflicts. There is ample research on how leadership is perceived and communicated in the mainstream media. However, similar literature on the business media is scant. One exception is Chen and Meindl’s (1991) work, which examined print business media’s portrayals of leaders with a case study of one well-known CEO in the 1990s. The study revealed how CEO images are portrayed based on the performance of the organization they lead. The researchers content analyzed a textual sample of 180 entries in Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes magazine in which they concluded that images of CEOs in the media is often consistent with the performance of their company. Negative images are portrayed consistent with performance failure of the company, but in a way that also maintained consistency with previous constructions. Hannah and Zatzick (2008) looked at the same business media that Chen and Meindl used to examine how ethical leadership portrayals evolved over a period of time. In their study, they found insignificant changes in portraying ethical leaders despite the increasing number of scandals in companies.

Emotion, power, and leadership are also examined through a study of business media coverage of corporate leaders’ public behaviors. Kantola (2014), in her study exploring how leaders’ emotion is portrayed in Finnish business media, identified two kinds of publicly displayed leader emotions: paternal managerialism and enthusiastic individualism. The media portrayed the paternal managers’ emotions as solemn and restricted while the individual enthusiasts’ emotions as forefront and personal.

The media has a bias in its portrayal of women leaders and men leaders (Campus, 2013, Campbell and Childs, 2010, Falk, 2012, Garcia-Blanco and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2012, Harmer et al., 2017, Heldman et al., 2005, Krefting, 2002, Lee and James, 2007). For example, Krefting’s (2002) findings from critical discourse analysis of the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, demonstrate how gender stereotypes, competence, and likeability often appear in women executive portrayals, while similar issues are not raised in the portrayal of male executives. Similarly, Lee and James (2007) note that press articles that appear after the nomination of a female CEO tend to emphasize gender-related attitudes more than organizational considerations, which is not the case when men are appointed as CEOs. In Mavin, Bryans and Cunningham’s (2010) study, gendered media constructions question women’s acceptability as political leaders and trivialize or ignore their contribution. Similarly, Campus (2013) reveals that the media covers women political leaders in ways that it minimizes their visibility.

The literature also shows that the media focuses on describing leader dispositions and behaviors. In their computer-assisted content analysis of political leadership images in newspapers, Aaldering and Vliegenthart (2015) reveal several personality traits that are often shown to be important in political leadership. One such a quality often portrayed to be necessary is authenticity (Iszatt‑White et al., 2018).

The literature on leadership portrayals or representations has two characteristics. First, while the study of CEOs is based on business media, the study of political leadership focuses on news media. Second, the literature is predominantly about CEOs and political leaders. There is a research gap as far as micro level leadership and new media are concerned. My paper responds to this gap by focusing on the business media, particularly online magazines that reach wide readership and cover the topic of leadership frequently. My objective in this paper is to examine the discourse of leadership in the context of the business media. I examine the construction of leadership, the role of leadership stakeholders in imposing a meaning of leadership, and how the dominant meaning portrayed is impacted by market and the text writers’ motives.

Section snippets

Methodology

The notion of discourse evokes diverse meanings. Jürgen Link defines it as “an institutionalized way of talking that regulates and reinforces action and thereby exerts power” (Link, 1983, cited in Wodak and Meyer, 2009, p. 25). According to Foucault (1977), discourse is related to power as it operates by rules of exclusion. It is controlled by objects (what can be said), rituals (where and how one can say), and the privileged (who can say). My study begins, first of all, with the assumption

The business media and leadership text production

The business media, which specializes in the business industry, is the discourse field that competes with other fields in promoting leadership in its own fashion. Recently, as the discourse of leadership began to gain traction in academia and popular texts, the subject is becoming a leading topic in the print and online business media. Not only does the print media features the topic of leadership regularly, it has become a platform where both writers and readers interact. As result, it has

Portrayals of leadership

In this section, I present dominant constructions of leadership using exemplars and illustrations from the sample articles. I place the constructions within the frame of three organically sequenced categories. By doing so, I wish to reflect the logics of the constructions which can be abstracted as follows: Leadership is primarily about the leader; the leader is a distinct being through his/her dispositions and agency; and such distinct dispositions and agency can be attained through the

Discussion

The sample texts construct leadership as a person, a process that I call personifying leadership. Unlike what the academic literature tells us, leadership is not constructed as a process, a relationship, and an influence that emerges because of the intricate and complex ways followers and leaders engage together (e.g., Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). The construction of leadership in the e-magazines has a pattern: It puts primacy on the leader, identifies the leader as a being, and acknowledges that a

Conclusion

In this study, I sought to examine the discourse of leadership (not leaders) in the business media. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I looked at leadership texts, motives of the creators of the texts, and how the two discursively impose a meaning of leadership that serves the leadership development market. The analysis revealed a homogenic representation of leadership, at least in their construction of the leader as the ultimate actor. Contrary to the literature, the media places leaders

Dr. Kedir Assefa Tessema is Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies at Wilkes University. His research interest includes leadership discourse, followership, and leadership education.

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    Dr. Kedir Assefa Tessema is Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies at Wilkes University. His research interest includes leadership discourse, followership, and leadership education.

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