'Offering Positive Subtext: On Managing the Meaning of Leadership Behaviours, Relationships and Contexts' Leadership, Organisations, Behaviour and Reputation Research Seminar

As well as being the Director of the Bachelor of Science in Economics and Management, the largest programme in his department, Dr Fischer is also the Yearly Review Editor of Leadership Quarterly, the premier journal devoted entirely to leadership research. He co-edited a special issue on measuring leadership beyond questionnaires for this journal and is currently co-editing another special issue on theory in leadership and management research.

Dr Fischer received his PhD in Economics, Subject Area Management, from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Prior to his doctoral research, he received a Masters degree in Mathematics from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, as well as a Bachelors degree in Mathematics and a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany. His studies were funded by three scholarship programs: the German National Academic Foundation, the Bavarian Max Weber Program and the Hanns Seidel Foundation.

For his research, Dr Fischer focuses on managing people in organisations. By exploring the conceptualisation and measurement of leadership styles, he aims to offer more accurate means of assessing leadership styles than the more scientifically untenable evidence supporting the advice to lead authentically, ethically, with a transformational style or more generally in a 'positive' way. He also studies how people talk about their leadership, covering how leaders that speak in an uplifting manner can appear superficial when it does not always match their actions. However, rather than simply dismissing this as hypocrisy, Dr Fischer investigates the extent to which these leaders are expressing sincere aspirations or ways in which they want their leadership to be interpreted.

The topic of this presentation is 'Offering Positive Subtext: On Managing the Meaning of Leadership Behaviours, Relationships and Contexts'. Challenging the prevailing view that the meaning of leadership is self-explanatory, this seminar seeks to address the implicit assumption that people understand leadership behaviours, relationships and contexts in similar terms and that they affect them in predictable ways.

The meaning of specific leadership behaviours can be interpreted in multiple ways and is therefore inherently ambiguous. For example, harsh criticism of a person can be seen as both constructive feedback and humiliation. Among other things, the relationship between people (e.g. allied or rivals) and the context (e.g. private or public) influence this meaning-making process. However, both the relationship and the context may themselves be ambiguous. Two team members may view each other as professional allies or rivals for promotion and a team meeting may be considered private because it excludes team outsiders or public because other team members are present.

As such, managers need to provide positive subtexts for critical actions to increase the likelihood that others will interpret their behaviour favourably. Similarly, managers need to occasionally offer positive subtext for how they view the context and relationship to increase the likelihood that others will interpret it positively and act accordingly. Demonstrated through discussions of the ways in which offering positive subtext contributes to clarity versus ambiguity in the workplace and how it serves as a potentially problematic but still useful tool for social influence, this process of providing positive subtext to behaviours, relationships and contexts is an overlooked leadership behaviour and an important part of managing meaning in organisations.

The seminar is for an internal audience and will be held on 20 March 2025, 1:00pm, in room LG01 of the Henley Business School building, Whiteknights campus. For those unable to attend in person there is also the option to dial in remotely via Microsoft Teams. If you are interested in joining, please contact Alex Baker on a.j.baker@henley.ac.uk

After the seminar has concluded, Dr Fischer will lead an expert session on 'Being an Editor and Publishing at Leadership Quarterly' with members of faculty and research students from 2:15pm. This session is aimed academics at different stages of their career looking to hear from Dr Fischer’s editorial experiences and will cover the role, responsibilities and insights of an editor, the process of editing review papers and contributions, reflections on the editorial experience and the best practices and considerations for publishing review articles in Leadership Quarterly.

Additionally, LOBR PhD students and early career faculty are invited to attend an 'Ask the Expert! Research, Publishing and Academic Careers' roundtable discussion from 4:00pm. This session seeks to share valuable insights from Dr Fischer's experiences in building research, publishing and editing academic articles in top journals.

Members of LOBR faculty may also request to book a one to one meeting with Dr Fischer on 21 March 2025. Each appointment will last 30 minutes, between 9:30am to 12:00pm. Slots are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. To arrange an appointment, please contact Alex Baker on a.j.baker@henley.ac.uk

LOBR research seminars are co-ordinated by Professor Bernd Vogel and Dr Anastasiya Saraeva.