“What’s Past Is Prologue” 1

Welcome to our second special issue on leadership communication. Editing these issues gave us the chance to engage with many well-established and emerging experts in leadership communication. The collaboration also gave us a chance to look back at what has been accomplished in leadership communication over the past 50 years, survey the current state of leadership communication, and even catch a glimpse of where we might go. We now have a much keener respect for the giants whose shoulders we stand on—those people who have previously mapped out the ever-advancing terrain of leadership communication (Breton, 1997; Clutterbuck & Hirst, 2002; Greenbaum, 1972; Hackman & Johnson, 2013; Knapp, 1969).

We presented a leadership communication model in our introduction to the first special issue on leadership communication, and we continue to apply the framework here (see Figure 1 for a graphical presentation of the model and brief narrative overview of its properties). We use the model to describe each article in this issue and help us better understand leadership communication’s boundaries. We also look at what these articles tell us about where leadership communication is going and where it needs to go in addition to using the model.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Dimensions of leadership communication.

Opening this issue is “Communicating Leader-Member Relationship Quality: The Development of Leader Communication Exchange Scales to Measure Relationship Building and Maintenance Through the Exchange of Communication-Based Goods” by Omilion-Hodges and Baker. Their study takes a fresh perspective on a well-established leader-member exchange theory (Gerstner & Day, 1997; Graen & Cashman, 1975), and explicitly investigates the theory’s communication foundation. And their study enriches our understanding of the entire LMX process through this focus. Communication has always been integral to LMX, yet few studies have explicitly examined it theoretical and practical impact (Geertshuis, Morrison, & Cooper-Thomas, 2015; Lloyd, Boer, & Voelpel, 2015; M. Mayfield & Mayfield, 2009; Mueller & Lee, 2002). Omilon-Hodges and Baker do more than just place the communication process at the forefront of LMX—they have created a psychometrically sound new instrument to examine it. With the scale, the authors have built a framework for other researchers to examine the process in different settings. Their study mixes qualitative (focus group based) and quantitative (survey based) research to more fully capture the LMX phenomenon. While mainly focusing on the dyadic level, they also examine the group-level implications of their findings. Also, their work—being based in LMX theory—draws from the psychological perspective and is placed in an individualistic setting.

Their article is also noteworthy because it uses one of the theories that shows up most often in communication research: leader-member exchange theory (Geertshuis et al., 2015; Kacmar, Witt, Zivnuska, & Gully, 2003; Lee, 2001; Lloyd et al., 2015; M. Mayfield & Mayfield, 2009; Mueller & Lee, 2002; Turnage & Goodboy, 2016). The authors’ theoretical exploration is important because leadership communication research tends to lack such contexts for examining communication phenomenon. (For some recent examples of International Journal of Business Communication studies firmly grounded in existing theories, see Bakar & McCann, 2015; Evans, 2015; Jamal & Bakar, 2015; Madlock, 2012; Raina & Roebuck, 2016.) Instead, most researchers take an approach of developing specific frameworks to examine a given phenomenon. Such an individualistic approach is better for capturing the full nuances of a situation (Fort, 1975; Thomas, 2007), but makes it difficult to build on prior research or create a stream of research others can develop (Kuhn, 1996). Hopefully, scholars will examine more existing (noncommunication) leadership theories for implicit communication components and make these attributes explicit. Such an avenue will help enrich leadership and business communication understanding (Leipzig & More, 1982).

The next article shifts focus from the dyadic level to organizational with Paul Argenti’s “Strategic Communication in the C-Suite.” Argenti’s article gives us both an historical overview of how top organizational leaders create and implement a strategy through communication and a structure to understand these strategic communications—a theoretical framework that we hope others will build on. Argenti employed qualitative methods to capture actual C-suite communication perspectives from personal interviews. This approach provides us with a powerful window into how leaders in some of the top business in the world implement their strategy-directed communications. These interviews were with North American–based companies, placing the study in an individualistic setting, and the top leader focus places it in the more traditional psychological perspective.

While the LMX article showed the power of building on established theories, this article shows the power of using direct observations to build theory and capture communication flows in an organization. Argenti showcases the strength of structured qualitative methods to capture the messy process of leadership communication (Smeltzer & Werbel, 1986; Waller & Conaway, 2011). While leadership communication research has increasingly turned to more narrow examinations and quantitative methods, this article highlights the need and benefits of qualitative work. Such scholarship offers the field new viewpoints and ideas for future exploration. Quality work such as this is difficult to execute well. But without such contributions, our field risks becoming too narrowly focused. This article is also a bridge between relevance to practicing managers and the rigor demanded by researchers (Thomas, 2007).

Our next article “Discourse of Leadership: The Power of Questions in Organizational Decision Making” by Aritz, Walker, Cardon, and Li examines leadership from a very different angle. This article adopts a discursive view of leadership (Clifton, 2012; Walker & Aritz, 2014, 2015) by examining how it emerges in a group setting through the generation and exchange of questions. While set in an individualistic culture, the research extends work started in a collectivist culture (Aritz & Walker, 2014), and investigates the similarities and differences between the contexts. The study offers a ground-level view of how leadership emerges in teams through the use of members’ questions. By choosing this focus, the article helps us better understand the shared leadership process (leading to practical implications) and lays the groundwork for a rich theoretical model that can be developed for future studies.

This study is one in a line of inquiry by Aritz and Walker (2014) who have developed the general idea of discursive leadership to examine the role of questions in specific. Yet here the authors have also developed a new way of looking at leadership communication—and leadership in general—moving from a person-centered concept to a shared concept. Traditionally, leadership (and leadership communication) has been viewed as coming from a single person (Christensen, 2014; J. Mayfield & Mayfield, 2016; J. Mayfield, Mayfield, & Sharbrough, 2015). In comparison, this study promotes the notion that leadership may not be anchored in a single person. Rather, it is coconstructed by engaged actors. This idea diverges from models which describe a leader emerging from a group, or different members taking on various leader roles. Instead, this article suggests that the leader role may exist outside of any one person and be a collective property of the followers as a whole. This novel line of reasoning begs to be continued in future development and analyses.

Also applying a collective framework, “New Lamps for Old: The Gulf Leadership Communication Framework” by Catherine Nickerson and Valerie Priscilla Goby examines communication, a vital yet often overlooked region of the world—the Middle East (Suchan, 2014). The authors discovered that leadership communication operates differently there in comparison to the more often studied Western world (Cucchi, 2015). In fact, the authors make a major contribution by presenting evidence that even in dyadic communications, the region has an underlying collectivist nature. Their research sets the stage for new studies in the Middle East, and gives us a step toward creating a leadership communication typology to complement existing national management typologies (Brunton, Kankaanranta, Louhiala-Salminen, & Jeffrey, 2015; Cucchi, 2015; Ngai & Singh, 2015; Roebuck, Bell, Raina, & Lee, 2016).

The study’s insights bring up intriguing thoughts of new worlds to explore. We need more such investigations to enhance our understanding of different leadership communication cultures (Hall, 1977; Madlock, 2012). Ideally, some future researcher will undertake the task of creating a global typology of leadership communication. This typology will lead to better understanding of culturally embedded leadership communication processes and universal leadership communication activities.

The issue’s commentary by John A. Fortunato, Ralph A. Gigliotti, and Brent D. Ruben (“Racial Incidents at the University of Missouri: The Value of Leadership Communication and Stakeholder Relationships”) presents a case study on how organizational-level communications operate through multiple perspectives. The authors investigate how leadership communication shapes formal leaders, emergent leaders, and grassroots activists. The authors adopt a discursive lens for leadership to examine how people use leadership communication to try and maintain order and control, while others use it to disrupt the status quo in the pursuit of a higher goal. The authors also examine how leadership communication emerges rather than exists in a predesignated person. This case is also interesting because the specific setting shows more hallmarks of a collectivist culture (at least on the part of the students) even though it takes place in a nation with an individualistic culture.

This socially relevant and timely commentary underscores the need for more advances on both the ethical leadership communication and identifying its complex dynamics. Often research neglects the ethical implications of events, but ultimately these events should be integral to our investigations of leadership communication. Our work should be about making life better for everyone through business communication (Garner, 2016). Furthermore, this commentary’s case study format is ideal for understanding complex issues. We encourage well-crafted case studies in the future since they offer more expansive comprehension of events than quantitative or even many qualitative methods (Hale, Dulek, & Hale, 2005).

We round out this issue with an article on motivating language theory (J. Mayfield, Mayfield, & Kopf, 1995; M. Mayfield & Mayfield, 2016; Sullivan, 1988). This short note (“Leader Talk and the Creative Spark: A Research Note on How Leader Motivating Language Use Influences Follower Creative Environment Perceptions”) takes a dyadic, psychological perspective, and is set in an individualistic culture. Our study examines how leader communication effects an important employee outcome—their feeling of freedom to be creative at work. This approach differs from most leadership communication research which typically takes a managerial perspective. The typical focus is on workplace outcomes important to managers and owners. Instead, this article looks at how an organizational situation can be changed to employee quality of work life. As with the “Racial Incidents at the University of Missouri: The Value of Leadership Communication and Stakeholder Relationships,” we hope that future researchers choose a more employee-oriented path.

While the future will always remain unclear, the articles in these two issues will, hopefully, inspire new interest and directions in leadership communication research. We look forward to seeing what the next decades of leadership communication scholarship will bring.