Facilitating Team Reflexivity About Communication

Abstract

This article explores how team facilitation can promote team reflexivity about communication. We present a case study that was conducted within a participatory action research framework with a Top Management Team for an international manufacturing company. We identify and analyze five key interventions that promoted team reflexivity. These interventions included activities such as (a) framing the facilitation, (b) inquiring into the key issues, (c) role modeling feedback, (d) positive storytelling, and (e) reflecting on concrete communication actions. The findings suggest that reflexivity can be enhanced through positive storytelling and emotion, framing and contextual sensitivity, and addressing interactional challenges within the team. The study complements previous reflexivity research by articulating how self-awareness about a team’s communication shapes the meaning making patterns and action potential of teams as well as how reflexivity is performed in action.

Keywords

action research coordinated management of meaning facilitation reflexivity top management team

Researchers have increasingly given attention to the development of reflexivity within teams as a means to avoid failures in information processing and to circumvent decision-making biases and errors in order for teams to adapt and improve their levels of innovation and performance (see Schippers, Edmondson, & West, 2014, for a review). West (1996) defines reflexivity as “the extent to which group members overtly reflect upon the group’s objectives, strategies, and processes and adapt them to current or anticipated endogenous or environmental circumstances” (p. 559). Reflexivity is typically viewed as a transition process referring to actions that teams execute between performance episodes (Schippers, West, & Dawson, 2015), which include activities associated with reflection, planning, and adaptation (MacCurtain, Flood, Ramamoorthy, West, & Dawson, 2010).

Widmer, Schippers, and West (2009), in their review of team reflexivity research, highlighted that reflexivity has been positively connected to a number of team-level outcomes including effectiveness, performance, and innovation. Team reflexivity has also been associated with better decision making (Schippers et al., 2014) and identified as an effective antidote for information processing failures within group processes (Schippers et al., 2014). Moreover, reflexive teams are more proactive and respond more effectively to changing circumstances than non-reflexive teams (Schippers, Den Hartog, Koopman, & van Knippenberg, 2008). Reflexivity influences team outcomes in different ways due to context. Recent research has attempted to clarify the reflexivity-team outcome relationship by examining how features of group context such as the physical work environment (Schippers et al., 2015) and prior team performance (Schippers, Homan, & van Knippenberg, 2013) influence the impact of reflexivity on team outcomes.

Reflexivity research has demonstrated that teams have difficulty spontaneously reflecting on their work methods and processes, preferring to focus on action rather than reflection (Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano, & Staats, 2014). It is not surprising, therefore, that reflexivity research has devoted a good deal of effort toward identifying structured interventions that foster and guide team reflexivity. Schippers et al. (2014) summarized a number of strategies for introducing reflexivity within teams. These strategies include fostering a deliberative versus implementation mind-set by creating reflexive meta-norms, questioning habitual routines that have emerged due to social entrainment, taking timeouts, using “stop and think” interventions, employing semi-structures such as time pacing to enhance the chances for reflection, and video recording team processes to provide opportunities for reflecting on the team’s activity. While some reflexivity interventions have focused on the effects of fostering individual reflection within teams (Müller, Berbig, & Petrovic, 2009), most reflexivity research focuses on interventions occurring at the team level and how they invite team members to engage in reflective communication with one another to become aware of their objectives, strategies, and processes and to assess whether they are on track to achieve their task.

In this article, we focus on reflexivity about communication; this represents a different perspective as compared with current reflexivity research that takes the perspective of reflexivity through communication. Reflexivity interventions have tended to emphasize the role of reflective communication as a tool for reflecting on a team’s objectives, strategies, and processes as opposed to making the team conversation itself the focus of reflexive inquiry. The former focuses attention on what teams need to talk about while the latter focuses attention on how teams talk about various topics and how particular kinds of communication dynamics may lead to particular task or relational outcomes. While we know that reflective conversation serves an important function in fostering team reflexivity, we know relatively little about the kinds of interventions that foster reflexivity about a team’s communication, the kinds of communication dilemmas such interventions address, and the consequences on the team’s subsequent communicative activity given particular interventions.

Developing a better understanding of how reflexivity about team communication is generated is important because social constructionist approaches to communication generally (Burr, 2003), and group communication more specifically (Frey & Sunwolf, 2005), have suggested that communication actively constructs team identities, relationships, and cultures, and is more than simply a process of transferring information among team members. From this perspective, communication actively creates and constrains opportunities for meaning making and action, and shapes the social construction of social realities. Therefore, changes in how one talks about an issue or topic creates new possibilities for sensemaking and action. For example, Peelle (2006) has demonstrated that teams tend to have higher levels of group potency and identification when they use interventions that are rooted in appreciative forms of communication. Appreciative forms of communication emphasize strengths and resources and define the future in light of existing best practice versus problem-solving form of communication that emphasize problem definition, solution generation, and solution selection.

Focusing attention on how reflexivity influences the communicative activity of teams is needed, as little research has explored how teams inquire into their own communication practices, how framing may be connected to reflexivity interventions regarding communication, and the consequences of such interventions on the subsequent communicative activity of teams. This study examines how team reflexivity can be facilitated through intervening into patterns of communication and poses the following research question:

Research Question 1: How can team facilitation promote reflexivity about communication?

To illustrate how team reflexivity can be facilitated through interventions aimed at changing patterns of communication, we present a case study where team reflexivity about communication was facilitated within a participatory action research framework by the first author who worked as an external consultant with a Top Management Team for an international manufacturing company.

Reflexivity, Team Facilitation, and Communication

There is a growing body of research that shows the benefits of “guided reflexivity” to team performance (Gurtner, Tschan, Semmer, & Naångele, 2007; Müller et al., 2009; Schippers et al., 2014). As a result, scholars have been interested in finding different methods and techniques that practitioners—team leaders, consultants, and facilitators—can employ to develop team reflexivity to foster effective teamwork within organizations (e.g., Bushe & Marshak, 2014; Hedman & Gesch-Karamanlidis, 2015; Schippers et al., 2014). Teams are considered to be the fundamental units of organizations’ functioning (Poole, 1997), and exploring how practitioners can facilitate team reflexivity by engaging in activities such as transformational leadership (Schippers et al., 2008) or team coaching (Hackman & Wageman, 2005) has emerged as an important focus in team reflexivity research. Developing reflexivity within Top Management Teams is particularly important as they are seen as the most powerful groups within organizations (Hambrick, 2007, 2010; Hambrick & Mason, 1984; Wageman, Nunes, Burruss, & Hackman, 2008) and their decisions can have long-lasting effects on the future actions and operations of the organization and its culture.

Team facilitation represents an important strategy for developing team reflexivity within organizations. Team facilitation is a sequence of interventions comprised of activities and techniques designed to help a team improve its processes and outcomes. Team facilitation techniques are valuable for enhancing the core processes associated with teamwork such as leadership, conflict management, decision making, knowledge sharing, relationship building, identity, and innovation (see, for example, Frey, 2006a, 2006b; Hartwig, 2014; Hartwig & Frey, 2007). For example, there are a number of facilitation techniques such as cognitive mapping, Devil’s Advocacy, dialectical inquiry, fishbone diagrams, and incrementalism that can be employed to facilitate team problem solving (Hartwig, 2010). Effective team facilitation is particularly valuable for top teams given that they need to make both strategic and operative decisions in rather complex and ambiguous environments (Zorn & Tompson, 2002).

A number of facilitation techniques have been developed for use in teams to enhance the deliberate reflection of teams on their objectives, strategies, and processes (see Sunwolf & Seibold, 1999, for a review). Such facilitation techniques and interventions typically focus on enhancing reflexivity through communication, meaning that they are designed to increase reflections and awareness about particular team features and activities such as its objectives and tasks through team communication. However, such facilitation techniques and interventions do not typically make the process of communication itself a focus for reflection and are not intended to foster reflexivity about communication. Reflexivity about communication focuses people’s attention on the forms of communication, that is, how the way people talk influences what they create—their identities, their relationships, and team outcomes. Reflexivity about communication centers on developing critical awareness of one’s authorship within the construction of team boundaries, identity, and relationships (Cunliffe, 2014; Putnam, Stohl, & Baker, 2012). As a result, Cunliffe (2014) specifically argues that paying attention to language use is important because the way we speak creates opportunities for meaning and action.

Coordinated management of meaning theory or CMM (W. B. Pearce & Cronen, 1980) offers one example of how interventions can be structured to foster reflexivity about communication (K. Pearce, Spano, & Pearce, 2009; W. B. Pearce, 2007). In their discussion of CMM, Bushe and Marshak (2014) observe that CMM assumes that “increasing the collective ability to reflect on the process of communication itself creates better social worlds and that it supports collaboration to keep asking what are we making through the way we are talking” (p. 23). CMM points out that in every conversational turn there is a choice to be made and a possibility for a transformation in the unfolding pattern of communication (W. B. Pearce, 2007). CMM provides a practical lens for understanding and intervening into team communication to create a difference within the patterns of communication so that team members can become more aware of the consequences of their talk and that more reflexive forms of communication can be facilitated (Oliver, 2005; Oliver & Fitzgerald, 2013). As a transformative theory, CMM is useful for scholars who intervene into practical situations to facilitate team communication (Craig & Tracy, 2014). While CMM scholars and practitioners use various facilitation techniques and methods, K. Pearce et al. (2009) identify systemic questioning (Tomm, 1987, 1988) and appreciative practice, inspired by Appreciative Inquiry (D. L. Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987; D. L. Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999), as two particularly important facilitation tools.

Systemic questioning focuses on drawing out the relationships and connections within teams. Questions are more than a way to gain information; the act of asking questions also creates new possibilities for meaning making. Asking a question is an interventive act, and asking questions in different ways invites different forms of communication creating new meanings and actions within a human system (Barge, 2012). Tomm (1988) has introduced different types of questions that have been since applied within social constructionist approaches. These include (a) lineal questions that are used for clarifying the sequence of events over time; (b) circular questions that are used for making sense of the connections of people, tasks, contexts, and so forth; (c) reflexive questions that encourage new communication patterns through introducing hypothetical future scenarios and alternative meanings based on others’ perspectives; and (d) strategic questions that are used to formulate actions and to open new ways of thinking. Using systemic questions not only facilitates new patterns of meaning making, but it can also foster awareness of the opportunities and challenges posed by current patterns of communication.

Appreciative techniques are used to draw out the positive resources that exist by inquiring into what is good and valuable. The premise of Appreciative Inquiry is the assumption that people evolve in the direction of questions that are asked, and therefore, it emphasizes asking positive questions to construct a desirable future (D. Cooperrider & Sekerka, 2006). Appreciative Inquiry has been criticized because of its overemphasis on the positive, which leads to eliminating more critical voices in conversations (e.g., Oliver, 2005). It is important to be sensitive to which forms of communication are useful to affirm in different contexts. Prior research on team reflexivity has emphasized that teams should become aware of the existing biases and errors within the team processes to improve their performance (Savelsbergh, van der Heijden, & Poell, 2009; Schippers et al., 2014, 2013; West, 1996). We believe that combining critical reflection with appreciative and affirmative forms of communication can facilitate reflexive practices that will allow teams to perform effectively. If the focus is too much on the appreciative, we may suppress stories of the problems, vulnerabilities, and fragilities team members experience, and on the contrary, if the focus is too much on the critical, we may limit the constructive possibilities for transformation.

To summarize, team reflexivity research has been valuable in articulating various facilitation techniques that foster reflexivity through communication and how reflexivity may lead to important task outcomes. However, these studies have not focused on reflexivity about communication and how team members may develop awareness of how their communication constructs different forms of meaning making and action that can engender different kinds of team outcomes. A focus on reflexivity about communication complements current research on reflexivity through communication by helping articulate how particular forms of communication invite and discourage various group outcomes. Therefore, the guiding question for this research study is, “How can team facilitation promote reflexivity about communication?”

Method

Researcher Positionality

The first author is a scholar-practitioner who has an active communication consultancy practice aimed at helping develop patterns of communicative practice that enhance people’s ability to collaborate and pursue desirable goals. Her consultancy practice draws on a variety of social constructionist theories and models of communication including the CMM theory (W. B. Pearce, 2007; W. B. Pearce & Cronen, 1980), systemic constructionist approaches to leadership (Barge, 2012; Barge & Fairhurst, 2008), and Appreciative Inquiry (D. L. Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999). Given our interest in this exploratory study to articulate the kinds of team reflexivity interventions about communication and their consequences, it made sense to investigate how practitioners such as consultants, who are committed to improving communication practices within teams, design and conduct interventions for enhancing team reflexivity about communication.

This study was inspired by the ethos of applied communication research of making a difference “not just from but through research” (Frey, 2009, p. 206). Applied communication scholars can combine facilitation methods with research methodologies to conduct research into interventions (Hartwig, 2014). The team facilitation conducted here was designed and implemented as a piece of participatory action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2006). Participatory action research highlights the collaborative ways of conducting research and is “conducted with people rather than on people” (Heron & Reason, 2006, p. 144, emphasis in original).

Participatory action research requires scholar-practitioners, in this case the first author as the external consultant, to take a different positioning toward research compared with more traditional forms of research. The external consultant used the ideas of process consultancy, a form of organizational development focusing on the communication process, to position herself in relation to the team (Schein, 1969, 1995). From this position, the aim of the facilitation was to increase the capacity of the team to help itself. The team members were treated as research participants, instead of research objects, who were involved in defining and analyzing the key issues, as well as formulating the next steps of the facilitation. Rather than focusing on predetermined interventions that are created prior to the intervention implementation, process consultants draw on the local understandings developed in situ, meaning the design of an intervention becomes emergent depending upon the development of the team.

External consultants use their communication expertise to make a difference (Frey, 2000), and the use of methodology may often be intuitive and is practiced in the moment as it unfolds. In that sense, the practice of facilitation becomes what Storch and Solso (2014) call the “embodied experience” (p. 188), or what Shotter (2006, 2014) has called the “withness-thinking” or “knowing-from-within.” This means that external consultants position themselves as part of the emerging moment and respond to it based on their embodied experience and knowledge. However, although the emergence of methodologies used in facilitation might be intuitive, it is not random, as the practice of participatory action research is grounded in theory (Simpson & Seibold, 2008).

Research Site

This study took place within a top management team, hereafter referred to as team, of an international manufacturing company operating in Finland, consisting of approximately 1,000 employees. The team consisted of nine people, all male, including the managing director (MD), human resources (HR) director, manufacturing director, engineering director, marketing director, finance director, business process improvement director, customer support director, and product management director. Eight of the participants were Finnish and one was German. The team language was English and the facilitation was carried out in English. Finnish was used occasionally when only the Finnish-speaking team members were present. This study was part of a larger team consultation conducted by the first author as an external consultant.

Preliminary conversations were held with the HR manager that informed the subsequent proposal for the overall design of the research process that was to be part of the facilitation. Although suggesting some initial phases and interventions, the initial proposal highlighted that the facilitation would be emergent, rather than planned, which is consistent with principles of participant action research (Reason, 2006). At this point, the production of data and its confidentiality were also discussed (see Lindlof & Taylor, 2011).

The initial proposal was then discussed with the MD and the HR director, who agreed to proceed with team facilitation. The initial request from them was to help the team to increase their team spirit, which here was perceived as a social construct produced in team communication. The company had experienced an industrial decline and was going through a corporate turnaround. The team was seen as setting the example of communication to the entire company. Therefore, the purpose of the facilitation was to support the execution of the turnaround program by focusing on improving team communication and enhancing reflexivity about the team’s communication. A contract issuing confidentiality was signed in the beginning of the facilitation.

Structure of Intervention and Data Collection

Given the exploratory nature of this study, a case study approach was adopted to detail the various ways that reflexivity about communication was facilitated in the team. A variety of researchers have suggested that case studies are particularly useful as they can provide rich detailed descriptions that enable deeper understanding of a phenomenon (Silverman, 2005). Various forms of qualitative data were collected including interviews with all nine team members, video recordings of two team meetings, field notes from three team meetings, and audio recording of three intervention workshops, which were part of the regular team meetings. The external consultant took a participant-observer position during team meetings, which enabled her to work with and reflect on the discursive material emerging from within the moment during the team meetings. The interventions and gathering data formed an integrated cycle where the methods of practice became the methods of research (Seibold & Meyers, 2012).

Each facilitation phase followed the structure of the regular team meetings, which often lasted for 2 days. All interventions took place within the team meetings and were scheduled on the meeting agenda. The facilitation followed the principles of participatory action research in the sense that each facilitation phase emerged from the previous facilitation phase and the team members were engaged in defining and designing the different phases (e.g., Bargal, 2008, regarding principles of action research). For example, the external consultant facilitated the design of the next stages with questions, such as “How would you like to continue?” and “What would be important to focus on next?” enabling the team to participate throughout the research process in the co-design of the unfolding facilitation. Table 1 summarizes the five emergent phases constituting the facilitation.

Table 1.

Research Phases and Data.

Time	Description of phase	Data
January 2014	Phase 1/Meeting 1: The aim was to understand the situation of the team. The first author interviewed each team member and video recorded the team meeting.	Interviews (audio recorded, a rough transcription) Team meeting (video recorded, transcribed)
February 2014	Phase 2/Meeting 2: The first author provided feedback to the team based on the outcomes of the first phase. The first author also facilitated a workshop where the team members discussed the key themes brought up during the interviews and created ideas to move forward.	Team meeting (field notes based on participant observation) Intervention Workshop 1 (audio recorded, transcribed) Intervention Workshop 2 (audio recorded, transcribed)
March-April 2014	Phase 3/Meetings 3 to 4: The team continued on its own to establish new practices. The first author was in contact with the team members via email.	Written material, such as emails and instructions for introducing new practices
May 2014	Phase 4/Meeting 5: The team meeting was video recorded to explore how the team communication has developed.	Team meeting (video recorded, transcribed, and field notes based on participant observation)
June 2014	Phase 5/Meeting 6: This phase was the evaluative point to reflect on the facilitation and decide about future actions.	Team meeting (field notes based on participant observation) Intervention Workshop 3 (audio recorded, transcribed)

The facilitation started with a diagnostic phase (Phase 1), where each team member was interviewed to more fully understand what the team members actually mean when they talk about team spirit. Each conversation lasted about 1 hr and covered aspects of the team communication in general, leadership issues, and team meetings. In addition, a team meeting was video recorded to explore how the individual stories connected to the authentic team communication situation.

In the beginning of the facilitation, the team members shared concerns related to their meetings, leadership, and overall atmosphere. The external consultant conducted a thematic analysis using the initial interviews and the first day of the first team meeting regarding team member perceptions of their team communication. Table 2 summarizes the themes team members identified that they felt affected team communication. The examples are quotations from the interview data.

Table 2.

Themes Affecting the Team Communication.

Description of the theme	Examples
Stories of failure and stuckness	“We start something then it stops.” “There is a big desire to make change but it is like having an unsharp axe that keeps bouncing back.”
Stories of divide in the team; individuals versus. team, MD versus team members	“Everyone works as a gatekeeper but does not contribute.” “. . . two camps, managing director and leaders.”
Stories of communication problems	“One can talk 10 min by himself so that no one listens.” “There is no supportive and positive atmosphere, it doesn’t really invite participation.”
Stories of the unspoken issues	”Some topics have been banned.” “. . . everyone knows the issue is there but we never talk about it.”
Stories of inefficient meetings	“Meetings should be more focused, there is no material in advance, there are no decisions.” “It feels like meetings are the best time to take care of extra work.”
Stories of expectations about leadership	“I wish there were clear messages about what we would like to focus on.” “I expect much more from a leader.”

Note. MD = managing director.

During the interviews, the team members expressed concerns about being stuck as a team and failing to execute agreed actions. According to the team members, there was also a divide within the team and that the team was a group of individuals rather than a team. The team members described their communication as discouraging, deflated, and consisting of “dark monologues.” They said there were issues that were not discussed and some topics might even be implicitly banned. They also shared their hopes to focus more on positive stories and developing constructive coaching culture between team members. In addition, they voiced their experiences related to inefficient meetings and unclear leadership. There was a sense that leadership was not shared but was solely the responsibility of the MD.

Despite the focus on the team’s communication challenges, the team members also expressed that there was good energy and a willingness to change and that the team was a good group of people. In addition, some of the stories were paradoxical; while team members shared stories of negative and criticizing atmosphere, they also shared stories about team members being afraid to criticize and express their opinions openly. This led to an interpretation that there were several important issues that the team members had not discussed together, and that it would be important to facilitate conversations about those topics to help the leadership team move forward. To address the stories the team members had shared, the facilitation was designed to (a) create an understanding of the underlying issues of the team, (b) focus on the team as a system instead of individuals, (c) empower the team members to try out new things and come up with solutions, (d) facilitate positive storytelling within the team, and (e) facilitate feedback culture among the team members.

The understanding of the local situation generated by the first phase led to the design of two interventions in Phase 2. During the first intervention, the external consultant provided feedback regarding the themes the team had identified that affected their communication based on the interviews and the video recorded material collected in Phase 1. She introduced some of the general themes and showed three short clips chosen from the first team meeting to illustrate the themes. The second intervention focused on reflecting and discussing the themes brought up during the interviews. These themes were developed into questions (e.g., questions regarding the theme of leadership: “How should we talk about the expectations toward leadership?” and “What kind of an example of leadership do we show to others?”), and the team members then chose which of the questions they would like to discuss further. After choosing the questions, the leadership team members discussed them in two small groups of four to five people and produced ideas and actions, such as clarifying the purpose for each topic on the meeting agenda, to be taken forward.

The actions suggested by the team were taken into account for Phase 3. During this phase, the external consultant did not meet with the team but facilitated the team’s own planning by sending an email with a summary of the outcomes of Phase 2 and with further suggestions for facilitating the workshop in Phase 3. The team members therefore worked independently and partly followed the suggestions and partly adapted them to fit into their situation at time. One team member took the responsibility for facilitating the workshop.

Phase 4 involved both video recording and participant observation during the regular team meeting to explore the shifts in the team communication. The observations in Phase 4 led to the design of Phase 5, which also had an evaluative purpose as this was the agreed ending of the facilitation. Phase 5 included a CMM-based intervention where the team members were invited to explore the connections of their speech acts, meetings, relationships, team identity, and organizational culture. Here, the external consultant offered transcriptions from previous team meetings to serve as an input for the team members to explore those connections. This conversation also served as the base for reflecting upon the overall experience and outcomes of the facilitation and deciding future focus points for the facilitation.

Analysis

Key intervention analysis

The first analysis sought to identify key interventions during the overall facilitation that were deliberatively designed to increase team reflexivity about communication. We worked iteratively, shifting our focus between the data and theory. As a first step in the analysis, we went through all the material gathered during the facilitation to build a general understanding of the data. The first author then identified striking moments that emerged from participation in the facilitation where she felt that the intervention that was performed at a particular moment had an effect on the team’s reflexivity. Shotter (2010) argues that a starting place for any inquiry is identifying the striking moments from the data as these are moments where the observer senses something important has occurred in the flow of conversation that affects the conversational trajectory. These moments can be viewed as bifurcation points where the choice of action moves the conversation to a different trajectory (W. B. Pearce, 2007).

In addition, a timeline of the activities and episodes comprising the facilitation was created. All conversations that addressed team actions, such as prioritization (e.g., “We need to prioritize what is the most critical to turn this boat”), alignment (e.g., “We as a team we need to really have one voice, work in the same direction”), performance challenges (e.g., “If this continues like that the confidence will fade away, and if that happens we are in deep trouble”), relationships (e.g., “We should get rid of functional thinking”), and reflections on their external environment (e.g., “We need to create a proper working relationship with the people who are there now”) of the team were included into the timeline to understand the flow of communication and topics. The first author placed the set of “striking moments” regarding interventions into the timeline. Once the interventions were placed into the timeline, she then noted shifts in the team’s communication—the form of communication and topics discussed—that resulted from the intervention.

The data analysis followed an iterative process, rotating among the identification of interventions that were striking moments, the placement of the intervention into the timeline, and exploring the effects of the intervention. The first author took the lead on the analysis and several meetings were held with the second author to question, challenge, and refine the analysis. We worked abductively cycling between processes, which identified key interventions, their timing, and their effects as well as having conversations until a coherent account of the key interventions was developed (see, Shepherd & Sutcliffe, 2011, for a description of abductive research). Five key interventions were identified using this process, which will be discussed in the following section.

Team reflexivity intervention outcomes

A portion of the last team meeting focused on evaluating the outcomes from facilitation. The first author conducted a thematic analysis of the field notes from the team meeting including flip charts. As is typical for qualitative thematic analysis (Tracy, 2013), she began coding the field notes and flip charts identifying a variety of outcomes. This initial set of codes was then integrated into a higher order set of codes regarding outcomes for the reflexivity intervention.

Findings

Key Interventions Facilitating Reflexivity

Based on our analysis, we identified five key interventions that promoted team reflexivity. The key interventions took place in different phases during the facilitation (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The key interventions in relation to the research phases and data collection.

Key Intervention 1 (Phase 2, Intervention Workshop 1): Framing the facilitation

One key intervention was a choice by the external consultant regarding how to frame the initial workshop. The individual interviews conducted by the external consultant revealed a dominant story related to the division of the team into two camps with each blaming the other, with the MD being the target of a great deal of negative feedback. Rather than frame the workshop in terms of the individual-level behavior of the team members or the MD, the external consultant framed the facilitation in terms of collective team responsibility for providing feedback on their collective communication. Framing the facilitation as an opportunity to focus on joint accomplishment of teamwork shifted responsibility of poor teamwork from a single individual or small number of team members to the team as whole, and also avoided entering in a pattern of blaming particular individuals on the team for poor performance by holding the entire team accountable.

Prior to discussing the main themes with the entire team in the first intervention workshop, the external consultant decided to have a private conversation with the MD, as some of the feedback emerging from the individual interviews was targeted at him. This conversation then resulted in the consultant using the frame of collective responsibility in the beginning of the workshop with the entire team instead of reinforcing the pattern of blaming. The external consultant explained that she had had a conversation with the MD beforehand because of sensitive feedback concerning him, and that the MD wished that the team members could share that feedback to him directly. The external consultant explained,

I wanted to have a discussion with him first because, well, he is the leader, the MD, and also because there was some feedback that was concerning him, but as a conclusion we had that it is not really my job to tell that feedback to (MD’s name) but I think and (MD’s name) was also thinking that he wished that people could come and tell him those things we were sharing and what came up in the interviews.

This framing created a framework for team members to reflect on the feedback they wished to present to the MD and take responsibility for their feedback, versus positioning the external consultant as a conduit for their feedback.

The frame of collective responsibility was sustained by the external consultant in the feedback session by developing an activity where she invited the team members to focus on the joint coordination of communication. She showed three short clips taken from the first video recorded team meeting and invited the team members to reflect on what they were creating together in communication. Framing their focus in terms of reflecting on the joint interaction of the team, versus focusing on individual behavior, directed their attention to the patterns of communication they were making together and their consequences. The external consultant explained to the team that she saw this intervention as inviting a shift, “from blaming someone of doing something to seeing how we all create—when watching the clips, what do we actually do here, what are we making and creating.”

Through the act of framing, the external consultant invited particular forms of communication by focusing on the systemic team-level issues as opposed to individual issues solely associated with the MD (e.g., Wheelan & Furbur, 2006). This set the boundaries and focus for the facilitation and further helped the team members to pay attention to the joint coordination of communicative activities and what they were constructing together as a team. This further helped them to focus on creating solutions together. For instance, the team members discussed how to make their meetings more effective, creating ideas for structuring their meetings differently (e.g., more breaks during meetings).

Key Intervention 2 (Phase 2, Intervention Workshop 2): Inquiring into key issues

The team discussion focused mainly on creating solutions for enhancing meetings during the first intervention workshop although during the initial interviews the team members had brought up much more sensitive issues related to their relationships and leadership culture. The external consultant thought these needed to be discussed openly as a team, which led to the second key intervention in the second workshop. Building on Tomm’s (1987, 1988) work on interventive and reflexive questions, the external consultant made a choice to explore the underlying issues of relationships and leadership culture by formulating the key themes in the form of questions. The deliberate choice of asking questions about the themes versus making declarative statements about the themes was intended to transform the prevailing patterns of monologue and blame by inviting the team members into a collective mode of inquiry. She designed an intervention for the purpose of presenting key questions that emerged during the interviews.

During this intervention, the external consultant proposed a set of questions based on the interviews and observations during the earlier team meetings and asked team members to choose questions they felt were important to ask to facilitate forward movement. They were also invited to generate more questions as individuals to enrich the conversation and add perspectives. The type of questions varied, some of them required a more thorough reflection as a team and some of them were addressing simple problems that could be solved. She asked the team members to categorize their questions into two themes: (a) ideas and quick solutions and (b) bigger issues that require a deeper understanding regarding the team’s lived experience. By using these two categories, the external consultant hoped not only to fulfill the need of the team members to create practical solutions but also to highlight that there are also more complex issues that require more time and further understanding until they can be solved.

This intervention created team reflexivity as it was the first time during the facilitation that the team reflected explicitly and collectively on their key issues. At the end of the workshop, one team member said that “we don’t do like this,” meaning that the facilitation introduced something new into the way they discussed their issues; it was something they hadn’t done before as a team. In the end, they expressed that they should continue these kinds of conversations in the future as it helped make them aware of both the topics they needed to discuss as well as how to use questions to help guide their discussion of selected topics.

Key Intervention 3 (Phase 2, Intervention Workshop 2): Role modeling constructive feedback

The third key intervention occurred within the second workshop when the team members chose and generated questions about the key issues characterizing the team communication. There was a striking moment when one of the team members offered a question of his own, “Why do we not walk the talk?” referring to the feeling of stuckness in the team. Before this question, many other team members had started to discuss the topics they felt were important, and they seemed to be actively engaged in the conversation. However, once the team member began explaining his reasoning behind his question, there was a sense that he was not only questioning but also undermining other team members’ chosen topics. The external consultant noticed a shift in the atmosphere as the team members became quiet and deflated. The question proposed by the team member sparked a particular series of conversational turns presented in Table 3.

Table 3.

An Example of Role Modeling Feedback From February 2014 Workshop.

Team member M9 suggests his own question, “Why do we not walk the talk.” The question has a tone of undermining the previous questions.	Turn 1 Provocative question
	Turn 2Provocative action	The external consultant responds with a disagreement and explains that all questions can be inter-related.
Team member M5 responds and provides direct feedback to the team member M9, “People start to look at you M9, what are you going to do?”	Turn 3Questioning behavior
	Turn 4Expressing concern	The external consultant expresses her concern about the direction of conversation and invites the team members to become conscious about their speech acts.
The team continues bringing in other questions and discusses leadership.	Turn 5Not responding to M5’s feedback
	Turn 6Emotional response	Team member M5 responds by sharing how he is trying to do his best, “I bloody hell walk the talk.”
Team member M7 responds by offering positive feedback about the performance of the team member M5.	Turn 7Positive feedback

As demonstrated in Table 3, the external consultant made an intervention into the conversation by challenging the reasoning behind the proposed question, stating that the topics can be seen as inter-related, and that it might not matter to make a distinction between which questions are more valuable (Turn 2). Team member M5 then offered direct feedback to team member M9 and challenged his leadership behavior (Turn 3). The external consultant took another turn (Turn 4) and invited team reflexivity, explicitly and directly, by reminding the team how the communicative acts everyone takes invites different responses and modes of working together, and positioned everyone to be more conscious about that. The other team members continued discussing leadership, then the team member M5 responded to the original provocative question with an emotional speech stating how he was walking the talk, providing concrete examples of how he was doing that (Turn 6). This led the team member M7 to provide positive feedback to the team member M5 (Turn 7), calming the emotional atmosphere.

This episode illustrates how the external consultant’s acts of expressing disagreement and role modeling feedback invited team reflexivity and encouraged team members to provide constructive feedback to one another in front of the other team members. In the last turn of this episode, M7 (Turn 7) picked up the tone of the external consultant’s example and made an important turn to demonstrate appreciation toward his colleague, and therefore shifted the conversation into a more constructive direction. During the interviews, the team members expressed that sometimes they might be too afraid to share their opinions openly or give feedback to others because they were uncertain what reactions they might cause. The actions taken by the external consultant provided a model for the team members to share their thoughts with one another in a constructive manner. Toward the end of the workshop, one team member reflected on the importance of receiving positive feedback, like the kind they had witnessed and received in the workshop:

I have been here 2 years, I don’t know how many times I have got positive feedback, it is almost like if someone says something you’re almost like in tears (laughter), no but seriously, I think it is also this thing what I said you know we are discussing these things we have problems—we also should be celebrating the kinds of things that this is really moving forward—and we should also learn this kind of culture, I think more ourselves and we should with our own staff, when someone is doing something good that we remember to say that this is really well done.

Afterward, the team members started to provide more positive feedback to one another during subsequent meetings and workshops.

Key Intervention 4 (Phase 3): Introducing positive storytelling

The team members shared several stories about the desires of having a more positive attitude, providing more positive feedback, and celebrating successes. However, at the same time, the team members were creating and maintaining several negative stories in relation to their team, their communication, and performance. The external consultant decided to introduce the practice of positive storytelling as a response to the negative team stories. Storytelling is a key term used in the CMM theory, and it describes the manner people tell about their lived experience (W. B. Pearce, 2007). Different forms of talking and storytelling foster different emerging social realities. Therefore, the purpose of positive storytelling was to invite the team members to focus on and share more positive aspects of their team.

Building on the ideas of Appreciative Inquiry (D. L. Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987; D. L. Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999), the consultant suggested that at the beginning of the meetings each team member share a story by answering the following two questions: (a) What are you proud of in your work at the moment? and (b) What has been important that you would like to share with others? Because she was not working with the team face-to-face during the 2-month period in March and April 2014, she sent written instructions to the team members to design their own facilitation and to make plans on how to embed the practice into their meetings. This practice was implemented by the team members themselves in their meeting in March 2014 and has been continued since then.

Introducing the practice of positive storytelling also had another purpose, to break the monologic pattern of communication in the beginning of the meeting by inviting everyone to have a space to share their thoughts, which promoted more active participation throughout the meeting. In the January meeting, the team used a monologic pattern of communication that created a sense of “depressive atmosphere.” One team member even described their meetings as “dark monologues.” This dynamic is well demonstrated in the way the meeting began in January. During the first 15 min, the MD mainly spoke by himself, and the monologic pattern was carried throughout the meeting. After introducing the practice of positive storytelling, the team communication included more dialogic turns, as illustrated in the following extract from the beginning of a meeting in May 2014. In the beginning of the meeting, the MD asks the team members to share their recent news and what they are proud of. The MD starts the meeting with a short framing of the task and then facilitates the conversation by giving turns to the team members to tell their positive stories.

MD:

M6’s success story.

M6:

Well, one highlight, I met (name) last week, some of you know him, . . ., he said that he is very happy that according to the daily feedback he sees our level of quality has increased significantly and the trend is very positive, . . ., and when he says that one can know it is true, . . ., and I think it is the best evidence that our actions are bringing results.

MD:

Good. How about M7?

M7:

What could I say . . . For the last couple of weeks I have been participating in these workshops, and even though there is a lot of work to be done, it is clearly visible that there is awareness within (team name) and I think there are lots of positive things happening and you can see they are working really hard, . . ., my belief in the future has become better during these couple of weeks.

MD:

Now we have achieved a milestone, M7’s belief is back. (laughter)

M1:

How do I add that to the memo?

M6:

It also came with a big smile.

M7:

Put a cross in the box.

M8:

Nothing can stop this change now.

M6:

It was recorded. (laughter)

M7:

Oh.

MD:

OK. M2.

This key intervention promoted team reflexivity as the team members noticed that by inviting certain forms of communication they could affect their team atmosphere. In this case, focusing on positive communication helped them to create a more positive atmosphere. In addition, this practice promoted everyone’s participation at the beginning of the meeting, which then carried through the meeting. Afterward, the team members have said that the level of participation of all team members has increased.

After introducing this practice, the team members increasingly shared positive feedback with one another during their meetings. For example, in the beginning of the team meeting in June 2014, one team member said to another team member, “I have to say that you guys were unbelievably flexible,” while one team member gave feedback to another team member, “I am proud of my colleague (team member name), how we pulled the staff party together.” Also, the critical talk was not targeted at the team itself or the team members, but on the concrete actions (e.g., breaking agreed rules and principles) and practices (e.g., meeting practices), which could be further developed. The team members also stated in the June workshop that the practice of positive storytelling had been a good one, and that they should implement the practice in other forums in the company as well.

Key Intervention 5 (Phase 5: Intervention Workshop 3): Exploring concrete communicative actions

The external consultant wanted to further explore how the team members themselves perceived how their team communication might have been transformed. To structure the conversation, the external consultant introduced the CMM hierarchy of meanings (W. B. Pearce, 1999). The basic idea of the hierarchy of meanings is that communication involves multiple contexts, such as speech act, episode, self/identity, relationship, and culture (W. B. Pearce, 2007), which influence the ways of meaning making and action. Using the idea of the hierarchy of meanings, the external consultant provided transcribed statements from all of the video recorded team meetings as well as the audio recorded workshops between January 2014 and June 2014. The statements illustrated how the team members referred to their team itself and their performance as a team. The external consultant invited the team members to first have a look at the actual transcribed speech acts on a timeline, and then discuss their observations in pairs. In line with the hierarchy of meanings and suggestions made in facilitation literature using CMM models (Hedman & Gesch-Karamanlidis, 2015; Oliver & Fitzgerald, 2013), she also asked the team members to discuss how the actual speech acts constructed their team identity, their relationships, and organizational culture, and what kinds of future actions those speech acts might invite.

This intervention followed Samra-Fredericks’ (2000) discovery that reflecting upon detailed transcripts can facilitate team development as it provides concrete data for the team members to think about how they have contributed to the interaction during their meeting and what they made with each other through their contribution. Team reflexivity was, therefore, facilitated by using the transcript to reflect on the turn-by-turn conversations within team meetings to increase the leadership team members’ awareness about their concrete communicative actions and their relation to the team spirit including their team identity, relationships, and organizational culture. Offering concrete data and examples based on the team’s authentic communication during meetings and workshops helped the team members to explore their communication from an observer perspective.

This specific intervention helped the team develop awareness of the relationships between meaning, action, and context. For instance, in the June workshop, one team member pointed out that the context of the team was very different in the beginning of the facilitation (January 2014) compared with the one in June 2014, which is reflected in their communication. This led to a conversation emphasizing that communication is not only about reacting to a certain context but through their communication the team members are also shaping their contexts.

Team Reflexivity Intervention Outcomes

In the June meeting, the overall effect of these various interventions became the focus for discussion. Team members identified three important outcomes during this meeting. First, team members felt that the most visible shift in their communication was the increase of positive storytelling within the group, which was associated with a more positive team atmosphere. At the beginning of the facilitation, the team maintained negative stories of itself by referring to themselves with statements, such as “we always fall in these traps,” “this illustrates how bad we are,” and “we are seen as an unprofessional team.” The team slowly began sharing hopes for future actions and began to acknowledge what they had been doing well. By the end of the facilitation during the June team meeting, the team members were sharing stories of how they could see the “excitement within the whole company,” and that “for a long time there is a good feeling in the organization.”

Second, the team members reckoned their meetings had become more effective and structured, with team members more equally involved in the discussion. However, they also questioned whether their relationships and culture had really become positive and constructive. This was an important issue, and the external consultant suggested that because they had come so far over the preceding 6 months, future intervention work focusing on aspects of relationships and culture might be useful. In the next stage of consultancy, the external consultant and the team began to focus more explicitly on the relational context (e.g., relationships among the team members) of the team communication, and individual coaching sessions were scheduled.

Third, and of most relevance to the current article, the team members indicated that they had become more self-aware and monitored their communication behavior during meetings more than before. Team reflexivity was created by making interventions that not only allowed the team members to reflect upon the issues the team was facing and to create solutions and actions for next steps, but they were also able to reflect on their communication and make better judgments as to how their communication enabled or constrained their ability to address these issues. The improvement in team reflexivity can be understood by the ways the team members were introducing a level of meta-communication in their conversations. The team members, for instance, discussed what forms of communication they had in their meetings, which forms they should resist, and which forms to encourage. One example of meta-communication occurred when one team member expressed his concerns of how they make jokes during their meetings, of which some are targeted at one of the team members. In this case, this team member had made a lot of effort to improve his communication behavior, but these improvements were mainly acknowledged in jokes. The team member who first raised the topic then expressed his hope that rather than making jokes they, as a team, could further encourage developments in each other’s communication behavior.

Discussion

This article explores how team reflexivity about communication can be enhanced using team facilitation methods within the frame of participatory action research. Our article complements previous team reflexivity research that makes the team’s objectives, strategies, and processes the object of inquiry by making communication the focus of reflexive inquiry. Prior research on team reflexivity has focused on the activity of reflection, assuming that team reflexivity is accomplished when teams engage in reflective practice through communication (see, for example, Savelsbergh et al., 2009; Schippers et al., 2013; Widmer et al., 2009). We extend the concept of reflexivity by highlighting how self-awareness about a team’s communicative activities shapes the meaning making and action potential of teams and the way reflexivity is performed in practice (Barge, 2004; Cunliffe, 2002).

Understanding how reflexivity about communication operates within teams through team facilitation is important to develop interventions that enable shifts in discourses and patterns of communication that create new possibilities for meaning making and action. Our study identified five key reflexivity interventions: (a) framing the facilitation, (b) inquiring into the key issues of the team, (c) role modeling constructive feedback, (d) positive storytelling, and (e) reflecting on concrete communicative actions. Three key implications regarding reflexivity about communication emerge from this study regarding positive storytelling and emotion, framing and contextual sensitivity, and interactional problems.

First, our findings suggest that positive storytelling and emotion foster team reflexivity about communication. The practice of positive storytelling received positive feedback from the team in our study, and some of the team members have introduced the practice in their own staff meetings. Prior to the facilitation, the team had primarily constructed its team identity using “dark monologues” that constructed a negative depressive environment within the group. The external consultant used appreciative techniques that focused on what worked within the team and what it was proud of, which created an alternative discourse that the team could then discuss. As Shin (2014) observes in his study of positive group affect, positive emotions facilitate groups by broadening and building their understanding of situations. According to Fredrickson’s (2001) broaden-and-build theory, positive emotions both expand the scope of attention and cognition of the team members and broaden the resources and possibilities for action. Creating a positive discourse that creates a direct contrast with the group’s existing discourse provides a different lens to think about the team’s activities and helps them become aware of how making choices to tell positive stories about their team can open up new possibilities for meaning making and action. Future research that explores how positive storytelling can be used to foster reflexivity and the articulation of different appreciative facilitation methods and techniques and the impact is warranted.

Second, reflexivity was enhanced through framing and contextual sensitivity. The team in this study was highly fragmented with numerous negative feelings expressed toward the team leader. The consultant framed the initial sessions as giving feedback about group processes, inviting the team to reflect on three videotapes of portions of the team meeting. This was a particularly strategic frame that was sensitive to the existing context. It was certainly possible for the external consultant to frame the initial session as fixing leadership problems in the team and addressing the negative team climate. However, this framing would have directed attention to the leader and directly identified the leader as the primary cause of the negative team climate. Such a framing would have likely made the team leader uncomfortable and invited communication that centered on identifying past transgressions, locating them in a single individual, and focusing on blame. However, the external consultant chose to focus on the team members’ collective responsibilities for providing feedback on the team’s communication and for creating a positive team climate that centered on the collective action of the team, not the individual action of a particular person. This framing of the consultation was critical as it created a positive space for team members to reflect on their communication.

Fitting reflexive interventions to the context involves fitting the intervention to the discursive context. There is a general agreement on the benefits of enhancing team reflexivity, but there have also been studies that suggest developing team reflexivity might not always generate positive effects (see Moreland & McMinn, 2010, for a review). As a result, team reflexivity research has increasingly emphasized that a contingency approach to reflexivity needs to be developed that specifies when reflexive interventions are warranted (Schippers et al., 2013, 2015) and when there is a need for reflexivity (Pieterse, van Knippenberg, & van Ginkel, 2011). Our research suggests that even when reflexivity is needed, the particular intervention needs to fit the team’s discursive context or the team might not adopt it. The discursive context is the set of stories, metaphors, and vocabularies that constitute the interpretive frames used by teams and team members to make sense of their experience (Bushe & Marshak, 2014). While previous research has identified particular contexts when reflexive interventions may make a difference, it is also important to understand how the context may shape which interventions are chosen and implemented, and whether they are accepted and used by teams. This suggests that future research needs to pay attention to how particular interventions may work well (or not) within particular contexts and how practitioners create contexts for legitimizing the use of particular interventions.

Third, reflexive interventions address specific interactional difficulties regarding communication dynamics as opposed to fostering reflexivity at a global level. The various key interventions point to the need for different kinds of conversations to occur depending on the interactional challenges within the team that are pressing at particular times. The key interventions presented in this article highlight interactional challenges regarding legitimizing and creating the space for reflexive interventions about communication (Key Intervention 1), deconstructing existing stories (Key Intervention 2), working with differences between the stories lived and told within the team (Key Intervention 3), addressing negative emotionality (Key Intervention 4), and focusing on the concrete detail of language use and what it creates (Key Intervention 5). The perspective of communication as design highlights that practices, such as team communication, are laced with interactional challenges and that interventions need to be designed to shift current practice to more idealized forms of practice that address those interactional challenges (Aakhus, 2007). The present study highlights that teams need to develop forms of communication that help legitimize and fit new practices to the team’s context, explore in detail existing communicative practices and how they have become instantiated and perpetuated through the team’s communication, how contractions between talk and action are managed, and how emotionality is managed. Future research needs to explore the kinds of interactional challenges that are associated with fostering reflexivity about communication and develop techniques and methods for managing it.

What could provide further paths to enriching the concept of team reflexivity is the idea of meta-communication. Meta-communication, a term offered by Bateson (1972), refers to communicating about communication, and it can be explicit and implicit, verbal and nonverbal. Meta-communication can simply mean explicitly commenting and reflecting on one’s own communication and its intentions and impact or commenting and discussing others’ communication. In terms of reflexivity, meta-communication demonstrates awareness about communication. Carbaugh, Nuciforo, Molina-Markhem, and van Over (2011) describe discursive reflexivity as the process of meta-communication in which discourse in one level is used to discuss discourse on another level. Meta-communication can also be viewed as mindfulness in action (Safran & Reading, 2008). In the study presented here, the reflexive interventions were also about fostering explicit meta-communication between the team members, that is, talking about the talk to create an understanding about the team communication and the interplay of communication and teamwork. Meta-communication as a technique has been used explicitly, for instance, by family therapists who seek to address dysfunctional and functional communication patterns (Littlejohn & Foss, 2009). Further research could focus on investigating the outcomes of meta-communication interventions to team communication and reflexivity. Such research could provide further insights and specific methods about how reflexivity about communication can be stimulated within team settings.

Any research study carries with it limitations, and this study is no different. In one sense, this project focuses only on one top team and therefore may have limited transferability or generalizability. For researchers operating from a qualitative social constructionist orientation, the issue of transferability of concepts is key and the question becomes whether the ideas and concepts within this study have applicability for other top management teams, and teams in general (Tracy, 2010). Conducting additional case studies may address this limitation. For team researchers operating from a more quantitative social psychological orientation, this case study may be viewed as exploratory and the theoretical propositions from the study may be developed and empirically tested. Future studies that test theoretically generated hypotheses from this study can address issues of generalizability.

A second limitation of this study is that data regarding the longer term organizational effects was limited. This limitation is inherent with one-shot case studies and may be addressed by developing projects that are longitudinal in nature and involve working with multiple levels within an organization. The current study demonstrates that, in the short-term, the team members have used the practices that they developed during the intervention in subsequent team meetings as well as their own meetings in their respective units. W. B. Pearce (2007) observes that conversations have an afterlife meaning that they influence the activities of a human system over time and reverberate throughout the system. Developing teamwork at the top of an organization is always connected to the wider context of the entire organization, as top management teams have a long-lasting impact on the organization through the decisions they make. This might also be one aspect of enhancing reflexivity within teamwork at the top of an organization, as the team members need to become more aware of the ways they influence the organizational system through their communicative activities.

Future research needs to explore how reflexive practices are sustained over time and how they spread through the organization. For example, Hartwig (2014) suggests that communication scholars could use numerical organizational performance indicators to make a connection between the facilitation and its outcomes in the wider organizational context. These measurements could provide further insights about how the outcomes of an intervention might migrate throughout the organization. Further involvement in studying the long-term outcomes of facilitation is needed, and could include more fieldwork on site, including other organizational members’ perspectives as a resource for developing reflexivity of top management teams. Such research might begin to address issues regarding the creation of reflexive organizations, that is, how reflexivity is dispersed throughout the organization.

This study has shed light to the ways focusing on changing the team discourses can enhance reflexivity and thus develop team communication. The findings in this study have demonstrated discourse-based interventions and facilitation techniques that consultants and team leaders may use to introduce change and facilitate team reflexivity. Given the current technological developments, changes in the global marketplace, and complexity of our environment, the requirements for reflexive practices are more likely to increase.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work has been supported by grants from the Finnish Work Environment Fund under Grant 113161, and Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, granted to the Eerika Hedman-Phillips.

Author Biographies

Eerika Hedman-Phillips, PhD, is a scholar-practitioner focusing on social constructionist approaches to leadership and organizations, and on team communication facilitation and reflexive practices. She completed her doctoral degree in the Department of Communication at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, under the supervision of Professor Maarit Valo.

J. Kevin Barge, PhD, is a professor of communication at Texas A & M University, USA. His major research interests center on developing a social constructionist approach to leadership, articulating the connections between appreciative practice and organizational change, as well as exploring the relationship between discourse and public deliberation.

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