Interdiscursive leadership communication: From shopping around to critical meta-reflections and emergent dialogical positioning.

Communication realized as discourses, positions, and stories are the stuff leadership primarily is made of and recreated by. Leadership and organizational communication in late capitalism and postmodernity are characterized by hybridity, interdicursivity, and subtle discursive forms of power. We claim that these complexities and the lack of paradigmatic knowledge often get leaders to shop around, combining inconsistent and contradictory approaches. To avoid such inconsistent shopping, we suggest a critical discursive Awareness and Meta-reflection based on knowledge about Organizational Communication (AMOC). We draw on developments in theories of leadership, power, and paradigms within the field of organizational communication. These developments are related to their social and historical contexts. We claim that awareness of approaches, paradigms, forms of power, and positions, as well as their historical background, form an important background of knowledge. Such knowledge gives the possibility to learn, meta-reflect, and react and relate in different ways to leadership, communication, power, and the interpersonal relations in organizations. It also gives the possibility to change position; that is, to act, relate, and communicate in new and different ways. This may be developing and emancipating when interdicursivity, forms of power, positions, and stories are made transparent and discussed in a democratic manner among peers and researchers in a dialogical action research and learning space. We demonstrate this by analyzing empirical examples from an action research project between a group of leaders, researchers, and masters students based on the democratic and participating principles of the dialogue conference.