Leadership, Management and the Welsh Language

• Author: Doris Schedlitzki,Gareth Edwards,Gethin While
• Date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12087
• Published date: 01 March 2017

Leadership, Management and the

Welsh Language

DORIS SCHEDLITZKI,

1

GARETH EDWARDS

1

and GETHIN WHILE

2

1

University of the West of England, Bristol Business School, Frenchay Campus, Bristol, UK

2

Cabinet Communications Division, Welsh Government, Cathays Park, Cardiff, UK

Adopting a multilingual perspective, this empirical paper explores the varied use and meanings of referents of

leadershipand management among 24 Welsh seniormanagers. We arguethe importance of recognizing the linguistic

imperialism of the English language –and its dominant leadership discourse of the heroic individual leader –over

locally signified referents of leadership and management in other languages and discourses. At present, the lexical

item leadership lacks evaluation of its relevance and meaning within other languages and multilingual contexts.

We addto this gap through a discussion of research that analyses24 Welsh senior managers’reflections on referents

of leadership and management and their varied meanings in their two official workplace languages, namely, Welsh

and English. Based on the findings, we explore linguistic power dynamics represented in their reflections on this

language diverse work setting and conclude with implications for the practice ofleadership and management.

Keywords: leadership; management; language; multilingualism; Wales

Organizational leadership –linguistic

roots and boundaries

This paper adds to our understanding of referents of

organizational leadership and management in Welsh and

English through analyses of their diverse meanings for

24 bilingual senior managers in Wales and by reflecting

on linguistic powerdynamics within this language diverse

work setting. Such linguistic analyses are timely and

important in recognition of existing critiques (e.g.

Collinson, 2011; Alvesson and Spicer, 2012) of

organizational leadership as a western (Guthey and

Jackson, 2011) conceptualization, dominated by a

discourse that promotes masculine, middle class, white

images of leaders, rooted in the cultural and linguistic

boundaries of the assumed academic and business lingua

franca: theEnglish language (Jepson, 2010a). The English

word leadership within this dominant discourse is said to

derive from a mixture of Old German, Old English and

Old Norse (Grint, 2010) with a shared focus on direction

and travelling forth. This metaphorically powerful

(O'Reilly and Reed, 2010) future, goal oriented meaning

of leadership has within this discourse been closely tied

to that of management,anchoring the meaning of the latter

firmly in the day-to-day handling and controlling of

objects and processes and rendering it inferiorto the more

powerful image of leadership (Ford et al., 2008).

The field of leadership studies has started to recognize

and challenge the previously unquestioned dominance of

this mainstream discourse of the transformational,

charismatic individual leader (Collinson, 2011),

highlighting the linguistic heterogeneity of leadership

and management within the English language. Yet, one

important linguistic issue remains largely ignored in the

field of leadership studies (Schedlitzki et al., 2016) and

therefore requires our attention: the discussion of

linguistic imperialism of English (Phillipson, 1992) as an

academic and business lingua franca (Tietze et al., 2003;

Tietze, 2008), its influence on organizational discourses

and its impact on publication and leadership and

management development processes. Schedlitzki et al.

(2016) have argued that the dominant meaning of the

lexical items of leadership and management, rooted in

Anglo-cultures and deeply embedded in dominant

leadership discourse, has colonized organizational

practice and academic research to the extent that it has

limited our insights into and searchfor other lexical items,

referents for and meanings of leadership. Recognizing

Ozbilgin's (2011: 2) call for ‘contextual studies of

management’, we propose that it is time for leadership

studies to take a situated perspective that explores the

Correspondence: Doris Schedlitzki, University of the West of England,

Bristol Business School, Frenchay Campus, Bristol, BS16 1BB, UK.

E-mail doris.schedlitzki@uwe.ac.uk

European Management Review, Vol. 14, 19–31, (2017)

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12087

©2016 European Academy of Management