The Leadership Discourses

The analysis of leadership discourse is placed within a social constructivism paradigm and analytical concepts developed by interactional sociolinguistics (Schnurr, 2008). According to Gumperz (2015), interactional sociolinguistics is an approach to discourse analysis that has its origin in the search for replicable methods of qualitative analysis that account for our ability to interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday communicative practice. Schnurr (2008) stated that a combination of social constructionism and analytical concepts facilitates an investigation of the ways in which leaders’ discourse contributes to their performance, and in particular to the leadership in the specific context of their workplace.

Workplace and cultural context set a particularly crucial role in the construction and enactment of their members’ social identities. Groups that work together for a long time often develop behavioural and linguistic norms on which members regularly draw when interacting with each other. These norms are also reflected in the discourse of the leaders of such groups (Schnurr, 2008). There are different leadership discourses and each discourse describes how a leader leads a group and what role a leader plays to achieve the intended goals.

The authoritarian discourse

The authoritarian discourse is a hierarchical model in which followers are considered as a dehumanized resource. Under this discourse, the leader values the productivity as well as the efficiency of followers or workers. The leader expects the followers to respect the position, authority, as well as power and follow the orders of the leader. The followers should also know their place in the hierarchy within an organization. The role of gender also plays a very important role in controller leadership discourse. The behaviour of a male and female leader under this discourse is completely different. A female leader tends to use a more participative style of leadership while a male leader tends to control the follower and ask them to do the work (Chen et al., 2017). A female leader tends to be more caring, focusing on the needs of individuals, and look forward to helping others, emotionally invested as well as understanding. On the other hand, a male leader is expected to be more dominant, firm, to the point, focused on the bigger picture, and confident. The authoritarian discourse of leadership hence does not recognize the difference in culture and language and problems created by these differences. They always look for the result and in such a situation the teacher and students will not be able to produce the desired result.

The transformational discourse

The transformational discourse aims to create a strong as well as a dynamic organizational culture under the charisma, as well as the vision, of a transformational leader. The leader focuses on inspiring the follower with the help of charisma and passion. (Western, 2018). Madsen and Albrechtsen (2008) state that charismatic leadership implies that the leader is idolized as a superhero. The heroic leader is very often associated with change and is presented as the mediator of visions and values (Bennis & Nanus, 1985). However, in view of the strong focus on the leader, mediating may be regarded as a person who convinces people through their communication style. The transformational discourse is successful in an international school that is characterized by diverse cultures and languages. The transformational discourse focuses on changing the landscape and making it innovative to support the organization to achieve the goal, and avoid language barriers in international schools.

Distributed discourse

Distributed discourse advocates the leadership in a distributed as well as network context. Under this discourse, leadership redistributes power as well as leadership from a hierarchical and centralized structure throughout the organization in order to leverage the creativity and energy of the whole system. In this discourse, the leader plays a significant role that is to bring people, ideas, and the structure of the organization together in order to make the organization able to develop strategies to deal with the underlying challenges (Kaufman, 2019). The leader thinks like an architect, creating networks, and connecting people with the help of technology and process. The leader also creates space for other people within an organization to lead as well as recognize that leadership is a collective and collaborative process. It focuses on bringing all things together on a common platform and achieving the shared goal effectively. As people from different cultural backgrounds will connect together, they can improve the process and quality of education.

Comparing different leadership discourse and leadership style

Different leadership discourses and leadership styles are similar and different from each other in many aspects. For example, the distributed leadership discourse and transformational leadership are similar to each other because both of them aim to bring change within an organization. The distributed leadership discourse and the transformational leadership focus on motivating and inspiring people to lead the change effectively and efficiently in order to ensure the growth and development of the organization (Thibault et al., 2019). However, if the comparison is made between the above-mentioned leadership discourse and the authoritarian leadership discourse, it will be found that there is a significant difference between them. The authoritarian leadership discourse focuses on utilizing a human resource in every possible manner to improve productivity. It does not focus on the needs of the worker (Hoch et al., 2018).

Rast et al. (2013) argued, authoritative leaders, provide a clear, unambiguous, and direct prototype with their subordinates. They usually require subordinates to obey their rules completely and punish them if they do not follow their orders. As a result, employees could gain a better understanding of what they should do and should not do as a team member. Prior research also suggested that authoritarian leaders offer a better sense of what it means in terms of identity, attitudes and behaviour to be a member of the team (Wang, and Guan, 2018).

Leadership strategies to influence others

As it has been discussed that one of the key roles of a leader is to influence others, it is necessary to study the approach or strategies that a leader uses to influence others. There are several strategies that a leader uses to influence others. The leader uses organizational intelligence, team promotion, leveraging network, as well as a trust-building approach to influence others. Apart from this, a leader also uses soft skills, emotions, interviews, meetings, face-to-face interaction, to influence others (Azemi et al., 2017). Soft skills play a very significant role in influencing others such as listening skills, communication skills (verbal and non-verbal), public speaking, etc. Soft skills are necessary to negotiate with others and motivate them to accomplish the task or face the challenge effectively. Soft skills improve interpersonal relationships and help in building a strong relationship with others. A healthy relationship is required to influence the behaviour and thinking patterns of others. Communication is a key tool to persuade others to achieve goals and objectives (Yoke & Ngang, 2017).

According to Darics (2019), communication skills play fundamental roles in our everyday lives; so fundamental that many of us tend to take them for granted, rarely pausing to consider what they involve or just how important they are to us. Leaders use communication as a key skill to exercise their influence. The way a leader talks about his or her successful life story to employees or an audience of aspiring graduates is often framed in a way that emphasizes the leader standing out from the crowd, and that s/he persevered despite all obstacles (Spector, 2016)

Through motivation, emotion influences the behaviour of people. Emotion has a significant impact on the perception and attitude of individuals. With the help of emotion, a feeling of connectedness can be created within an individual that will guide the behaviour of the individual. It influences the transmission as well as the reception of discourse because emotion transfers information to others and based on the information perceived.

Interviews, meetings, and face-to-face interaction are different in an educational setting than in a business setting. In a business setting, workers or employees feel that they have to obey the order of the boss. Hence, most of the time, they cooperate with the boss in a meeting or face-to-face interaction. But in the educational setting, the scenario may not be the same, students and teachers may not consider themselves bound to obey whatever they are told they counter to question the teacher or the leader and it is the responsibility of the teacher or the leader to satisfy those they are leading. However, it is also important to understand that different cultures have a different impact on the meeting, interview, or face-to-face interaction (Day et al., 2016). Every culture has separate shared values that affect how an individual acts or thinks. Culture affects the behaviour of an individual and determines a particular behaviour as a right or wrong in the cultural context. Thus, the right behaviour should be demonstrated in face-to-face interaction in order to make the interaction effective and successful (Cambra-Fierro, et al., 2008).

Additional consideration

Apart from the leadership discourse, there are several other factors that can influence teachers and bring desired changes in the education system in order to facilitate teachers and students from different cultural backgrounds to cooperate and collaborate. Political discourse is one of the significant discourses that can influence teachers. The political discourse can be defined as the formal exchange of rational views with the help of which various alternative courses of action can be taken to solve the underlying problem (Johnson, Johnson, 2014). In the practice of political discourse, all actors such as politicians, organizations, as well as citizens are engaged to deal with the particular problem. The main function of political discourse is to identify several alternative courses of action that could be taken to address the problem (Smith, 2018). It could be applied to an international school with diverse cultures and languages to ensure effective collaboration and cooperation among teachers, parents, and students.

Academic discourse could also be used by leaders within an international school to deal with complex cultural as well as language differences. It refers to all languages that are used as well as produced within an academic setting either by students or professionals in spoken, written, and online form. Academic discourse encourages a higher level of communication (MacDonald et al., 2019). The learner develops new capabilities to participate in several discourse communities as a result of social interaction and cognitive experience. It also develops one’s voice, identity, and agency in a new language/culture (Duff, 2007).

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