{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.029074215761285386, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010711553175210406, 'mean_word_length': 5.637055837563452, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
CHAPTER 16 Leadership Communication

I n the first Handbook of Organizational Communication, the chapter on leadership was written by two leadership psychologists (Dansereau & Markham, 1987). Some 14 years later, a communication scholar authored the next Handbook chapter, although it was largely derivative of leadership psychology; the communication implications of individualist and cognitive leadership theories were the primary focus (Fairhurst, 2001). Both of these chapters reflected the times: Organizational communication was still coming into its own as a discipline (Mumby, 2007), and psychology had long dominated leadership study (Bass, 1981; House & Aditya, 1997). It made sense then to equate leadership with leaders whose strong inner motors explained how they transformed the world (for better or worse), while communication played a contributory, albeit subsidiary, role. However, since the last Handbook review, communication has played an increasingly central role in leadership studies due in no small measure to the emergence of a social and cultural lens—focusing on how culture and social interaction impact leadership—appearing alongside (the strong inner motor of) an individual and cognitive lens (Fairhurst, 2007a). As a result, organizational communication scholars are conceiving of leadership communication more complexly, for example, as an act of transmission and negotiated meaning. This, in turn, is moving communication scholars toward a more dialectical view of leadership: to see it as an individually informed yet relational phenomenon between people and even objects, to see leadership as a medium by which collectives mobilize to act but also as a highly desired (attributional) outcome of this interaction, and finally, to see leadership as definitionally unstable—across time, between people, and even among scholars—and yet oddly enduring. Turn to any recorded history to find that leadership is a concept for the ages. Unsurprisingly, with this new research complexity, the focus isn’t just on leaders, but all actors (formal or informal leaders, followers, or other stakeholders) who can be transformative agents—and, as we will see, receptors of meaning and disciplined products of a leadership culture. We begin the chapter with post-positivist approaches to leadership study, which are more individual and cognitive in focus while adopting a transmissional view of human communication. We then move on to an emerging narrative of more socially constructed views of leadership, which are more social and cultural in focus while emphasizing a meaning-centered view of