Leadership discourse and role of humor in it: A new orientation of business English
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Date
2012
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Abstract
The role of English cannot be ignored in global business. Humor, in its quintessence, bears numerous multi-faceted benefits for business and should be taken seriously. Discourse constitutes a crucial aspect of leadership performance. It has even been pointed out that „Imagining leadership outside of language is all but impossible‟ (Lyons & O‟Mealy, 1998). Indeed, it appears that many of the central leadership activities, such as creating and communicating a vision or mission statement, encouraging, motivating and guiding subordinates, setting a goal and ensuring subordinates‟ compliance all involve language (Bennis & Thomas, 2002). In spite of this long-winded relationship between leadership and language, there are amazingly few studies which view leadership performance from a linguistic standpoint (Wodak, 1997; Mullany, 2007). This paper aims at addressing this new orientation by illustrating some of the ways through which analysis of leadership discourse especially that involves humor will be carried out. The data analyzed in the paper proves that humor has a positive and productive effect in leadership discourse. CEO‟s may encourage this feature in their negotiations, daily written and verbal interactions and may feel the difference by miraculous impact of humor in their leadership practices.
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Keywords
Leadership Discourse, Humor, Global Business, Productivity, Employee Relations, Working Environment
Citation
Paper presented at 2nd International Conference on Business Management, 28th – 29th March 2012, Lahore - Pakistan