Leadership in Situ: Investigating Discursive Leadership in Software Development Teams

Creative Commons License

Özbakış Ö., Işik Güler H.

22nd International Conference on Turkish Linguistics (ICTL22), İzmir, Türkiye, 4 - 05 Eylül 2025, ss.55, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: İzmir
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.55
  • Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The study of workplace interactions has increasingly become a focal point of research in recent years with researchers employing a range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies (Angouri, 2018; Schnurr, 2024). Building on this line of research, the present study underscores the importance of analyzing language use and workplace practices, particularly leadership, from a linguistic perspective. In this respect, this study makes the very first noteworthy linguistic-based contributions to leadership studies in software engineering context and explores how leadership is discursively constructed in decisionmaking episodes during daily team meetings in a software development team. Software development teams work in complex, dynamic environments where effective leadership is crucial to project success (Dönmez & Grote, 2018; Hofman et al., 2023). This study explores how such leadership is constructed through language in team interactions. Based on data collected during a 10-month workplace ethnography, we focus on five hours of videorecorded virtual team meeting interactions in a web team in this presentation and employ Multimodal Conversation Analysis to demonstrate the interactional dynamics among the team leader, the business analyst, two developers and the project director. Using the concepts of deontics (Stevanic & Peräkylä,, 2012) and epistemics (Heritage & Raymond, 2005), we take an interactional approach to leadership (Clifton et al., 2020) and address the ongoing calls in leadership literature by examining how leadership is enacted in situ. More specifically, we tease out the discursive and multimodal processes through which leadership is accomplished. Thus, we not only offer insight into leadership research but also make significant contributions to workplace discourse studies in Turkey by examining the largely underexplored area within software development