Background: Past research has established the importance of discursive leadership in professional communication, but it has not systematically examined how conformity behaviors emerge as a potentially undesirable consequence of discursive leadership. Literature review: Review of the literature on the centrality of communication in leadership processes and conformity behavior suggest a void of analytic tools to adequately examine the negative consequences of discursive leadership. Research question: Are later interlocutors more likely to speak similarly to earlier ones if the earlier interlocutors occupy a more central position in the conversation network? Methodology: Based on 32,000 words of a transcribed meeting corpus, we measured conformity behaviors using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency scores, which are widely used in the information retrieval setting. We also operationalized the strength of discursive leadership as a positional centrality measure in the conversation network using a matrix algebra approach in social network analysis. Results: Findings support the hypothesis that discursive leadership is associated with conformity in language aligned toward discursive leaders’ opinions. Conclusions: This study makes theoretical advances in understanding leadership construction and conformity behaviors between leaders and followers using empirical, authentic meeting data. We also give business people an applied understanding of the process of discursive leadership, which may help them to improve communication efficacy in their organizations by reducing overly conforming behaviors. We recommend that future research include more diverse participants and be combined with a survey to supplement the conversation data.

中文翻译：

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追随领导者：商务会议中的领导力与整合分析


背景：过去的研究已经确立了话语领导力在专业沟通中的重要性，但尚未系统地研究从众行为如何作为话语领导力的潜在不良后果而出现。文献综述：对沟通在领导过程和从众行为中的中心地位的文献的回顾表明，缺乏分析工具来充分检验话语领导的负面后果。研究问题：如果较早的对话者在对话网络中占据更中心的位置，较晚的对话者是否更有可能说出与较早的对话者类似的言论？方法：基于转录的会议语料库的 32,000 个单词，我们使用广泛应用于信息检索设置的术语频率-逆文档频率分数来测量从众行为。我们还使用社交网络分析中的矩阵代数方法将话语领导力的强度作为对话网络中的位置中心性衡量标准。结果：研究结果支持这样的假设：话语领导力与语言与话语领导者观点的一致性相关。结论：本研究利用实证、真实的会议数据，在理解领导力建设以及领导者和追随者之间的从众行为方面取得了理论进展。我们还为商界人士提供对话语领导力过程的应用性理解，这可以帮助他们通过减少过度顺从的行为来提高组织中的沟通效率。我们建议未来的研究包括更多不同的参与者，并与调查相结合以补充对话数据。