EXPLORING LEADERSHIP CONFIGURATIONS IN DECISION-MAKING INTERACTIONS IN A TURKISH SOFTWARE ENGINEERING COMPANY: AN ETHNOMETHODOLOGICAL MULTIMODAL CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Date

2025-7

Author

Özbakış, Özlem

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This dissertation investigates how leadership is discursively constructed in three different software development teams within a Turkish software engineering company and analyzes the interplay between collective and hierarchical leadership. The study uses Multimodal Conversation Analysis and examines 20 hours of daily team meetings to explore how leadership is enacted during decision-making episodes as teams report their progress. It offers the first linguistically grounded contribution to leadership studies in this context, addressing several gaps in both global and local literature (Fairhurst et al., 2020). The analysis focuses on interactional dynamics among the project director, team leaders, developers, analysts, testers, and other participants, and employs the concepts of deontic and epistemic authority (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012; Heritage & Raymond, 2005). The findings reveal how leadership is co-constructed in situ through discursive and multimodal practices, and how different teams exhibit both unique and overlapping leadership configurations. It further contributes to ongoing debates in critical leadership studies (Alvesson & Spicer, 2014; Collinson, 2005, 2011), and the sociolinguistic body of literature on discursive leadership (Fairhurst, 2007; Schnurr & Schroeder, 2019) and brings new insights to workplace discourse studies in Turkey, an underexplored context in this field. It further contributes to applied linguistics by offering empirically grounded insights for researchers and practitioners interested in leadership, workplace communication, and software engineering.

Subject Keywords

Leadership, Daily Team Meetings, Software Development, Multimodal Conversation Analysis

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115405

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis