Negotiating leader identities through indirect mockery in talk about decision-making in a distributed leadership context

Abstract

In this article, we scrutinise how humour, and in particular, indirect mockery contributes to the construction of leader identities in talk about decision-making in an organisation characterized by a distributed leadership context. So rather than focusing on decision-making episodes themselves, we tease out an aspect of the goal achievement side of the leadership influence process. Through multimodal discourse analysis, we focus on episodes in which the implementation side of decisions is discussed and in which the head of the team initiates a humorous sequence, as this turned out to be an integral part of talk about decision-making. We found that the humour was always oriented towards upper management and that it could serve various functions. Overall, we argue that indirect mockery was a crucial means to navigate the tension that emerges from the team head’s position within the complex leadership constellation, thus offering a critical perspective on distributed leadership.