|
Discourses
of leadership change or changes of leadership discourse?
Cornelia ILIE1
1 Malmö University,
Sweden
2 cornelia.ilie@gmail.com
Abstract. The
present study focuses on the discursively performed leadership during periods
of transition and change in the context of competition-driven organizations. It
explores discourses of leadership in a diachronic perspective, scrutinising the ways in which they construct and
re-construct corporate and culture-related identities. Drawing on interviews
and press conferences with several CEOs of two multinational companies, Nokia
(Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden), an investigation of the challenges of
leadership branding was carried out in a discourse-analytical and pragma-rhetorical perspective. Particular emphasis has been
placed on systematically comparing the presentations in letters to employees by
the CEOs of Nokia and Ericsson. This comparative study provides evidence for
the internal and external challenges underlying leadership discursive
construction and re-construction aimed at ensuring a consistent
interconnectedness between a company’s values and its competitive qualities.
Keywords: eadership,
discourse, change, Nokia, Ericsson, values, identities
JEL Codes: M1, M21
1.
Introduction
In many
business organizations, people are becoming increasingly aware that there is an
interdependence between organizational outcomes and the impact of leadership
discourses (Putnam and Fairhurst 2001; Clifton 2012).
This is particularly noticeable in times of change, which is one of the few
certainties an entrepreneur can count on in business. Change comes in different
forms and even a minor change can have big consequences, where there is a fine
line between success and failure.
A
significant paradox can be noticed in current research on leadership. While
theories of leadership convincingly show that leadership is a distributed and
participative process rather than the individual action undertaken by any one
person, considerable attention is equally being paid to influential leadership
discourses widely circulated in the traditional media, social media and the
public sphere, which continue to focus on the profile, role, (mis)behaviour, (in)actions and (un)successful communication
skills of the CEO, who is ultimately held responsible and accountable for
‘doing’ leadership that amounts to change, success or failure of the company.
It is particularly symptomatic that nowadays the multilayered leadership
performance of a CEO – both discourse-shaped and discourse shaping – is under
continuous scrutiny, internally (by board members, collaborators, subordinates)
and externally (by shareholders, competitors, customers, business analysts,
media reporters).
The words,
phrases, feedback and statements expressed by CEOs are quickly noticed and
perceived as the externally directed voice, vision and view of the company.
This is why it is relevant to note the emergence and development of the ‘leadership-as-practice’
(L-A-P) movement (Carroll et al. 2008; Raelin 2016a),
according to which leadership is conceived of as a practice rather than as
residing in the traits or behaviours of particular individuals. The L-A-P
approach resonates with closely related leadership traditions, such as
collective, shared, distributed and relational leadership. For Raelin, leadership becomes evident when agency appears as a
constraint to structure: “Using such resources as self-consciousness and
deliberation, agents can use individual and collective reflexivity to overturn
the historical contexts and expectations imposed on people and institutions”
(p. 5). Although agency is normally exhibited during everyday routines, it
becomes more visible during moments of crisis, indeterminacy or uncertainty. An
individual’s idea or thought may spur other members of the organization to
start a creative initiative, to find a way out in a critical situation or to
overcome unexpected challenges or disruptions.
2.
Aim and focus of the study
The present
study examines the interrelatedness between organisational change and
leadership-enacted discourses, by focusing on two telecommunication companies,
Nokia and Ericsson. In both cases, there is a continuous and deliberate search
for a way to revolutionise the concept of IT through the development of
competitive, highly performing leadership and organisational teams, motivated
through strongly articulated commitment discourses. Drawing on presentations
and mission statements of CEOs of two Nordic multi-national companies, Nokia
(Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden), a comparative analysis of the challenges of
enacting participative leadership is carried out from a discourse-analytical
and pragma-rhetorical perspective.
The focus of
the present study is on the discursively constructed and publicly displayed
performance of CEO leadership in the context of competition-driven
organizational change. It explores the focus, scope and essence of discourses
of leadership in a comparative perspective, scrutinising the ways in which they
contribute to constructing and reconstructing organisational and
culture-related identities. From an analytical perspective, CEO leadership
practices of Nokia and Ericsson are examined as a communicational, relational
and context-sensitive phenomenon that is enacted and re-enacted through
discursive practice.
Both
companies are known to have started with a strong link to their respective
national identity, but overtime they have often displayed shifting discursive
leadership strategies in the national and international context. Nokia is part
of the modernisation process of Finnish society and related to a strong
national narrative of catching up, while Ericsson represents the continuation
of a proud industrial tradition where Swedes for decades have been a most
advanced nation (Lindén 2012). Doing leadership, this
has been a cornerstone in the process of discursively and interactively
articulating the intermittent re-contextualisation and re-invention of these
two companies, has at times worked differently in the two cases, in terms of
innovative change and competitive advantage. This comparative study exposes
stereotypes and counter-stereotypes, providing evidence for the internal and
external challenges, as well as the personal and interpersonal dynamics that
underlie leadership discursive construction and reconstruction aimed at
ensuring a consistently adaptive interconnectedness between a company’s values
and its competitive qualities.
3.
Discourse-Driven
Change in Business Organisations
The process
of social change raises questions about causal relations, interdependencies,
transitional processes, innovative problem-solving, strategic decision-making,
all of which construct and get articulated through discourses (Berger and Luckmann1966).
Examining discourses emerging in connection with organisational change enables
us to connect particular conceptualisations and representations of leadership
in terms of prerequisites, end-goals and relations of power.
Adopting a
systemic leadership approach, Beerel (2009) starts
from the assumption that organisations are expected to grapple with change at
all levels all the time. They break or recreate new paradigms that do not
follow a classic cycle path. As a result, she views leadership as fundamentally
concerned with the process of change. John P. Kotter,
renowned for his work on leading organisational change, found that unsuccessful
transitions almost always fail during at least one of the following phases:
generating a sense of urgency, establishing a powerful guiding coalition,
developing a vision, communicating the vision clearly and often, removing
obstacles, planning for and creating short-term wins, avoiding premature
declarations of victory, and embedding changes in the corporate culture (Kotter 1988, 1996). Processes of social and institutional
change construct and get articulated through discourses of change and changes
of discourse. As has been pointed out by Fairhurst
and Putnam (2004), organisations may be seen in a perpetual condition of
becoming through the ways in which the properties of discourse shape
organising. Important transformations often occur when an organisation has a
new CEO who is supposed to be an effective leader and to be able to engage in
dialogue and communicate appropriately the unavoidability and/or the need for a
major change.
4.
Theoretical
Approaches to Discourses of Leadership
A notion of
agency relevant to this study was developed by Emirbayer
and Mische (1998), who see it as a temporally
embedded process of social engagement, and at the same time as a variable and
always changing phenomenon. The temporality of agency is manifest in the way
social actors display different temporal orientations towards past, present,
future since in concrete instances of action all three elements are present,
although usually one of them predominates. A discursive perspective on agency
conceptualisation (Emirbayer and Mische
1998; Fairhurst and Connaughton2014) and on L-A-P (Raelin 2016a, b) underpins the overarching research
question of the present analysis: In what ways and to what extent do discourses
of leadership and agency overlap interact and co-construct shared meanings?
Since
discourses are socially and contextually co-constructed (Phillips and Hardy
2002), they arise through the interplay of discourse, text, and context. In
this respect, socio-pragmatics (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983) offers relevant
analytical tools for a context-sensitive approach to patterns and norms of
language use, for example, as they are instantiated in the realisation of
speech acts (Austin 1962;Searle 1969, 1975).
In order to
scrutinise and compare the ways in which discourses of leadership are
articulated in the Swedish and the Finnish company, respectively, it is
necessary to examine how organisational, cultural and (inter)personal
context-specific factors determine particular linguistic choices, and primarily
the nature and force of the speech acts and the corresponding agency-related
pronominal forms. Significant aspects of speech act performance are degree of
(in)directness, audience involvement and
speaker–audience relationship. In particular, the speech acts performed in
discourses of leadership can be seen to sometimes reinforce and at other times
challenge stereotypical representations of organisationally, interpersonally
and culturally situated discursive leadership practices.
Although
theorists set forth several categories of speech acts (e.g. assertive,
declaratives, expressive, directives, commissives),
many studies on organisational discourse have focused particularly on
directives or speech acts meant to bring about a particular state of affairs
(Hill and Jones 1992;Heracleous and Marshak 2004). As
the present analysis will show, the speech acts used in CEO leadership
discourses tend to display a much greater diversity and multi-functionality.
5.
Leadership
Practices at Ericsson and Nokia
During their
long history, the two Nordic sister companies, Ericsson and Nokia, came to be
seen as “the industrial projections of national identity” (Hayward 1995,p. 2). Over time, Ericsson and Nokia have been close
partners in the advancement of mobile phone technology based on the Nordic
standard of NMTand later the pan-European GSM that
led the fields of different competing standards. The success stories of the two
companies often followed converging, but sometimes also diverging, directions.
Nokia—Discourse of Leadership and Change
By 1998,
Nokia’s focus on telecommunications and its early investment in GSM
technologies had made the company the world’s largest mobile phone
manufacturer, a position it would hold for 14 consecutive years. After periods
of Finnish and Canadian leadership, in 2014the India-born Rajeev Suri (who first joined Nokia in1995, working across the
board from production to handling key divisions), was appointed as CEO of
Nokia. Under his leadership, Nokia is developing into software and services
company that will compete with the likes of Ericsson, Huawei
and Google. The most recent acquisitions, the French Alcatel-Lucent, positions
Nokia as an innovation leader in next-generation technology and services.
Ericsson – Discourse of leadership and change
The
so-called ‘Swedishness’ of Ericsson was often
stereotypically emphasized by board and leadership team members, especially
when recruiting a new CEO. A case in point was the recruitment process in 2002
when the board was looking for a new CEO. The chairman Michael Treschow was searching for a Swede since, in his opinion,
Ericsson is a Swedish company with a Swedish management and a Swedish culture (Karlsson & Lugn 2009). The
new CEO recruited in 2003 was indeed a Swede, Carl-Henric
Svanberg, who successfully introduced a more informal
behaviour and more relaxed leadership communicative style. Hans Vestberg, an international Swede who had management
positions for Ericsson in China, Brazil, Mexico and the US, was appointed CEO
in January 2010.He actively promoted diversity and inclusion as the basis for
innovation and success. In July 2016, Hans Vestberg
had to resign, after facing pressure to step down as the company was struggling
with profitability in a period of slowing demand and intense competition. Vestberg’s leadership discourse style is the focus of the
present investigation.
Value-based leadership – Ericsson and Nokia
Ericsson and
Nokia organisational cultures are each guided by a set of core values in their
ways of doing business, making decisions, and overall ways of acting, behaving
and communicating internally and externally.
On its
website, Ericsson indicates three core values: Respect. Professionalism.
Perseverance. They are described as the core values
that define Ericsson culture and guide those working for the company in their
daily work and in the way they do business.(https://www.ericsson.com/about-us/our-vision)
The Nokia
core values are similarly described on the company’s website as “designed to
guide our decisions, our way of working and the responsibility we have towards
our customers and other stakeholders.”
(http://company.nokia.com/en/about-us/our-company/our-values). Four values are
listed and accounted for as embraced by all employees and executives at Nokia:
Respect – We treat each other with respect and we
work hard to earn it from others.
Achievement – We work together to deliver superior
results and win in the marketplace.
Renewal – We invest to develop our skills and grow
our business.
Challenge – We are never complacent and perpetually
question the status quo.
A parallel
can be drawn between the sets of core values that guide the two companies. The
first of the two sets of core values – Respect – is identical for the two
companies and is based on a fundamental ethical principle shared by both
companies. What actually make the difference between the two companies are
Nokia’s last two core values: Renewal & Challenge, which point to basically
encouraging and fostering an innovative and challenging spirit in the Nokians.
For obvious
reasons, all these core values are widely used as recurring keywords in both
internal and external company documents, CEO letters and statements, press
releases, a.s.o., and thereby they play an important
role in both reflecting and shaping discursively each of the two corporate
cultures, as well as their respective leadership styles and practices. At the
same time, it is worth noting that they also contribute to spreading common
stereotypes about Swedish and Finnish culture-specific business strategies and
corporate leadership styles, which may sometimes lead to unfounded
overgeneralisations.
6.
Stereotypes
and Counter-Stereotypes of Nordic Leadership —the Finnish and Swedish case
studies
The obvious
historical similarities between Finland and Sweden have often led to
overgeneralisations about an undifferentiated ‘Scandinavian culture’, with the
implicit understanding that all Nordic countries have very similar cultural
values (Smith et al, 2003).Some of the most widespread stereotypes about
Finnish and Swedish cultures as ascribed to business companies such as Nokia
and Ericsson.
- Nokia and
Ericsson are often stereotypically seen (both in their home countries and
abroad) as representing the national identities of Finns and Swedes
respectively, although we know that identities are hardly homogeneous and
particularly complex and dynamic phenomena, neither unitary nor static.
- A widely
acknowledged view is that in Finland and Sweden business organizations tend to
be quite ‘flat’, with power relatively equally distributed. While the two
cultures share elements of a so-called ‘Scandinavian type of leadership’ (Tyrstrup, 2005), this view can sometimes turn into a
stereotype when it is applied indiscriminately to two distinct cultures, which
happen to exhibit slightly different models of a basic ‘flat’ power
distribution through leadership among peers (Lämsä,
2010).
- A
principle that is stereotypically assumed to be shared by both Finnish and
Swedish cultures is the principle of consensus in decision-making, which would
reflect their egalitarian and equality values. While it is correct to say that
the two cultures are consensus-oriented, this orientation can take different
forms in individual instances. Thus, Finnish culture tends to exhibit a
“combination of strong consensus and deep controversy” (Luhtakallio
2010: 211), and in Swedish culture consensus is seen primarily as a condition
for dialogue, but also as a preferred outcome of the dialogue (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1993; Ilie, 2007 ).
Leadership
discourse stereotypes – the case of CEO letters
In order to
analyse and compare the whys and hows of leadership
discourse as discourse-in-action in two Nordic companies, the present
investigation focuses on the respective CEOs’ letters
to employees. As leadership agents, CEOs impact the situational context of
their company as much as they are impacted by it. The aim of a CEO letter is to
build credibility, to impart confidence, to highlight visions, and to convince
the audience (i.e. investors, shareholders, stakeholders…) that the company is
pursuing effective strategies, and delivering profitable performance. This
letter functions as a personal and public statement with multiple
potentialities: through it, the CEO of a major corporation exercises his/her
power to define social reality for corporate stakeholders, thus shaping the
context in which events or proposals are perceived and understood by the
public. On Argenti and Forman’s view (2004), a CEO is
considered the most credible voice of an organization since he/she is well
situated to communicate the company’s position and core values, and also
articulate its major issues of interest.
There are
several commonalities between Hans Vestberg,
Ericsson’s latest CEO and Rajeev Suri, Nokia’s
current CEO. Both of them belong to the same generation of leaders – Vestberg was born in 1965, Suri
in 1967 – ;,both of them had worked for about two decades for their companies
prior to being appointed CEOs – Vestberg joined
Ericsson in 1991, Suri joined Nokia in 1995 – ; both
of them have international working experience. It is therefore interesting to
examine, against the backdrop of these commonalities, the elements that
distinguish them in terms of their leadership discourse styles as they are
manifest in their first CEO letters to employees.
Challenging leadership discourse stereotypes
– Nokia CEO’s letter to employees
The CEO’s
motivational goals are meant to reflect and reinforce the organizational core
values, to highlight shared experiences, to indicate opportunities and point to
challenges to be overcome, while promoting a common organisational identity and
commitment. Rajeev Suri is the current CEO of Nokia
and the second non-Finnish CEO (after Stephen Elop).
His first letter to Nokia’s employees, made public in connection with his
appointment as CEO (on 3 April 2014), serves both informational and
motivational goals. In this letter he reinforces the legitimacy of his newly
assumed leadership position by highlighting the emotions (rhetorical pathos) he
is experiencing on this occasion. Expressing a feeling of humility is here more
than an instantiation of audience-oriented rhetorical pathos, it is an expected
attitude to be taken in the context of flat business organizational structures
that characterise Finnish (and other Nordic) companies. The next key notion,
respect, coincides with the very first of Nokia’s core values, and Suri uses it skilfully, alongside with related values, to
define Nokia and also to self-define as someone who has already (over 20 years
at Nokia) identified himself with the company: “These words and others have
defined the company and, in turn, have partly defined me […] I am part of Nokia
and Nokia is part of me.” His brief personal narrative is meant to prove that
he, born in India and a world traveller, has developed, during his 20 years at
Nokia, a Finnish leadership style.
Since Nokia
is a multinational corporation, Suri’s letter is
implicitly aimed at a multicultural workforce. A major challenge for such a
letter in a Finland-based multinational company consists in articulating an
energizing and goal-unifying discourse that succeeds in targeting and involving
a diverse audience of company employees in terms of cultural, educational and
professional background. In the underlined passages in (2) above, Suri is open and straightforward in self-defining (“I
consider myself an international citizen”) and expressing his beliefs (“I tend
to focus more on people than on place”), so as to engage and gain the trust of
his employees, many of whom constitute an international workforce in this
Finland-based multinational company. By pointing to his own culturally and
professionally diverse background, he is identifying with the reality of many
employees, establishing a closer proximity through the bond of commonalities
and shared experience. At the same time, Suri
mitigates his claim to international citizenship by providing a complementary
claim of belonging to Finland in his capacity of CEO. He does this by means of
two symbolic speech acts: an assertive speech act (“As CEO of Nokia, my place
is clearly in Finland, where I have lived since 2009”). He is thereby
challenging the stereotypical separation of the two claims (either-or),
highlighting instead their complementarities (both-and). Here the
counter-stereotypical element in Suri’s rhetoric is
the claim to Finnish belonging as much as to multiculturalism.
Indicating
that Nokia is confronted with a new reality and needs to overcome serious
challenges (“removing unnecessary distractions”), he wants to be perceived as a
responsible agent of change who is determined to avoid unnecessary risk-taking
or short-sighted pursuit of “small cost gain”. Rather than showing hesitation
in front of unprecedented challenges, or, on the contrary, mindlessly carrying
out changes, he assumes instead the pioneering role of a visionary, but
careful, leader in times of change. Suri’s
determination and courage are in line with the Finnish leadership stereotype,
but he also displays a counter-stereotypical trait when he recommends
exercising prudence when making changes: “We must have the courage to know what
to leave behind; to know what we must change and renew.”.
He upholds his constant eagerness to learn and to ask questions (“I will be
asking a lot of questions”), both of which resonate with and correspond to two
of Nokia’s core values: Renewal and Challenge. Suri
emerges here as an enabler of participative leadership, encouraging a
consultation dialogue as a two-way street, i.e. both sharing experience with
co-workers and motivating them to share information and ideas.
Rajiv Suri’s discursive leadership style exhibits both
stereotypical and counter-stereotypical patterns of CEO leadership discourse.
While generally following a Finnish leadership model that is consensus-based,
but also partly authoritative, he also displays the features of a participative
leadership discourse whose aim is to motivate and empower the workforce to
actively and jointly participate in vision creation, goal setting and problem
solving.
Leadership discourse stereotypes – Ericsson
CEO’s letter to employees
Hans Vestberg served as the latest CEO of Ericsson between 2010
and 25 July 2016. During his first years as CEO, the company solidified its
strong position and reputation in the international market. Recently, after
months of criticism, with Swedish media questioning his pay and many external
leadership assignments, and following increasing discontent among stockholders
due to fall in net sales and a 26 per cent plunge in net income, Vestberg was forced to step down on 25 July 2016.
Hans Vestberg’s first letter as CEO to Ericsson’s employees
(2010) is rather atypical in that it does not follow the normally used pattern
of starting with a self-presentation and continuing with vision presentation
and relationship building, by connecting informational and motivational goals.
Unlike Nokia’s CEO Suri, who started and ended his
letter with personal and emotional self-disclosure, Vestberg,
in spite of his international experience, can be seen to comply with a
traditional Swedish stereotype of non-assertiveness: “Strong emotions are
rarely expressed openly in Sweden, so indirect forms are used instead as
compensation.” (Holmberg &Åkerblom2007: 11).
Nevertheless,
even by Swedish standards, the way in which Vestberg
starts his letter is unexpectedly un-rhetorical: the first statements provide,
on a neutral and impersonal note, a matter-of-fact evaluation of the previous
year’s investment and financial performance: “2009 was a year of mixed trends
and with varied operator investment behaviour. Some markets were impacted by
the financial climate while others continued to show growth.” These are
statements that could very well have been made by a neutral external observer,
but not by the CEP of Ericsson.
Vestberg gives a
brief summary of Ericsson’s unsatisfactory market results, which he accounts
for in terms of the “challenging economic environment” during the previous
year. Worth noting is the absence of human agents, with the exception of two
instances: “we [1] maintained market shares” and “we [2] undertook significant
cost reduction activities”. The first person pronominal agents fulfil two
different indexical functions: we [1] is referring to
the company as a whole, whereas we [2] refers solely to the company’s
leadership team. It is symptomatic that no human agents are held accountable
for the negative results: “During the year we undertook significant cost
reduction activities. These, in combination with large losses in our joint
ventures, affected our earnings negatively.”Such a strategy is somehow predictable
in manipulative leadership discourse, since in times of low performance levels
or severe losses, leadership representatives tend to deliver the bad news
strategically by pointing to external circumstances and events, so as to avoid
taking responsibility (Thomas, 1997).
His ideas
about the future are expressed by means of successive commissive
speech acts performed in the first person plural “we”: “We will connect
people”; “we will connect our cars and trucks to smart road systems”. However,
these statements can hardly make an impact on the audience, since they fail to
outline a clear focus and a shared commitment to core values and goals for the
joint work that lies ahead. As has been pointed out in previous research (e.g. Edström and Jönsson (1998),
Swedish leadership is vague and imprecise: “the typical Swedish order is ‘See
what you can do about it!’ What does it mean? It obviously has to do with a
far-reaching delegation of authority. Managers who say ‘See what you can do
about it!’ demonstrate trust for their co-workers.” (Edström & Jönsson, 1998:
167). However, in an increasingly global world with very high levels of
dynamics, complexity and competitiveness, this stereotypical Swedish leadership
pattern has been undergoing considerable changes lately. Swedish leaders may
still prefer to practice a leadership based on an informal and coaching role
that leaves space for own initiatives, but they have also started to adjust
their leadership styles by providing straightforward guidelines, establishing
clear targets, and, above all, engaging and inspiring their co-workers to do
their best (Holmberg & Åkerblom, 2006). As
a result, recent studies on Swedish leadership have pointed out a rather
paradoxical situation with a combination of autonomy and team integration,
which can be understood as a mirror of the peculiar Swedish combination of
individualism and independence on the one hand, and collectivism and
cooperation on the other (Holmberg & Åkerblom,
2007).
Vestberg, known for
his long-term policy orientation, is simply ventriloquizing the agenda-setting for the “new
decade” in terms of organizational mission and goals. But in the process he
loses sight of the short-term objectives and the need to motivate the employees
to embrace the change by appealing to shared core values and a sense of
belonging to Ericsson. The measures of success indicated by him in the last
statement above are exclusively performance-oriented with no inspirational
appeal to collective commitment, organizational belonging, and interpersonal
bonding. The very last paragraph contains the only sentence in the whole letter
which is delivered in the first person singular pronoun “I”: “I am proud and
honoured to lead Ericsson into a new decade where we will undoubtedly break new
ground.” Vestberg’s approach to self-presentation is
totally different from Suri’s approach. While
generally following a Swedish leadership model that is consensus-based, he also
enacts the features of a laissez-faire leadership discourse whereby he assigns
considerable responsibility with subordinates, but without setting clear
guidelines or trying to reach a collective commitment.
Conclusion
Organisational
culture contexts and social practices generate implicit models of leadership
that are enacted based on institutionally and culturally grounded values. The
focus of the present investigation was on the discursively articulated
performance of leadership in the context of competition-driven organizational
change. It explored stereotypes and counter-stereotypes in discourses of
leadership in a comparative perspective, scrutinising the ways in which they
contribute to constructing and re-constructing corporate and culture-related
identities, as well as being impacted by them. Drawing on presentations in
letters to employees by the CEOs of two multinational companies, Nokia
(Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden), a comparative analysis of the challenges of
leadership discourse practices was carried out in a discourse-analytical and pragma-rhetorical perspective. Doing leadership, always a
cornerstone in discursively and interactively articulating the
re-contextualisation and re-invention of these two companies, has often worked
differently in the two cases, in terms of innovative change and competitive
advantage. This comparison provides evidence for the varying internal and
external challenges underlying leadership discursive construction and
re-construction aimed at ensuring shared commitment and interconnectedness
between a company’s values and its competitive performance qualities.
Starting
with commonalities, the analysis has revealed a number of significant
differences between the leadership discourse styles displayed by two CEOs,
Nokia’s CEO Rajeev Suri and Ericsson’s CEO Hans Vestberg. Two main categories of stereotypes have been
revealed: on the one hand, the stereotypical representation of Finnish and
Swedish leadership practices as undifferentiated ‘Scandinavian’; on the other
hand, the stereotypical representation of each of the two leadership practices
as ‘homogeneous’ and enacting national identity features.
The
examination of Rajeev Suri’s first letter as CEO of
Nokia reveals a multi-dimensional leadership style in terms of strength of
purpose, topical focus, level of commitment, discursive strategies, audience involvement
and relationship-building. His style exhibits both stereotypical and
counter-stereotypical patterns of CEO leadership discourse. While generally
following a Finnish leadership model that is consensus-based, but also partly
authoritative, he also displays the features of a participative leadership
discourse whose aim is to motivate and empower the workforce to actively and
jointly participate in vision creation, goal setting and problem solving.
Vestberg’s style
exhibits both stereotypical and counter-stereotypical patterns of CEO
leadership discourse. While generally following a Swedish leadership model that
is consensus-based, he also enacts the features of a laissez-faire leadership
discourse whereby he assigns considerable responsibility with subordinates, but
without setting clear guidelines or trying to reach a collective commitment.
7.
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