Decision-making talk is often where power is enacted in professional contexts. Discursive decision-making allows for participants to exert influence over decisions through their discursive performance. However, compared with L1 decision-making talk, participants in intercultural discursive decision-making can feel disempowered, even when they are highly proficient in English. The concept of discursive leadership from management and business communication studies offers a way to understand why this may be so. Discursive leadership (Fairhurst, 2007) views leadership as emerging in discourse through both the leadership and followership acts that people perform. Leadership can be performed in different ways – directively, collaboratively or cooperatively (Aritz & Walker, 2014) – and the extent to which different approaches are accommodated within a group talk allows for the emergence of a distinct discursive style. The presenter hypothesizes that due to different individual and cultural (and perhaps gender) preferences for discursive leadership style, which style emerges has implications for how easy or difficult it is for intercultural participants to exert influence in the decision-making process.

The presenter will consider the case of professional-context communication using English as a lingua franca. From a discourse analysis of data collected from simulated group decision-making meetings between multinational groups of government officials with high English proficiency, he will show how different styles emerge, how accommodation with emerging styles is made and not made, and how influence on decision-making is achieved and not achieved. Future applications for the research will be to develop communication and behavioural strategies to help ELF professionals become more competent at adapting to different discursive leadership environments and thereby maximizing their potential to contribute to decision-making.