Item Details

Negotiating the tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand workplaces: women leaders managing the challenge

Issue: Vol 11 No. 1 (2017)

Journal: Gender and Language

Subject Areas: Gender Studies Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/genl.31236

Abstract:

The ‘tall poppy syndrome’ (TPS) is one example of a societal constraint whose function in Australasia is to enforce society-wide ideologies such as egalitarianism and the gender order. The TPS acts as an enforcement mechanism which keeps self-promoting discourse in check. While carefully managed selfpromotion is permissible in some contexts, there are others where New Zealanders are expected to behave with modesty and humility. Using a social realist approach and drawing on data from four different professional contexts (a commercial company, a medical clinic, a government department and a nongovernmental organisation), this paper explores the discursive instantiation of the TPS in combination with potentially competing leader and gender identities as experienced by New Zealand women leaders. Finally, we ask if the pressure to conform to the egalitarian ethic, alongside other downplaying strategies, is gendered in New Zealand workplaces.

 

Author: Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra, Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar

View Original Web Page

References :

Ashkanasy, Neil M., Trevor-Roberts, Edwin and Kennedy, Jeff C. (2004) The egalitarian leader: leadership in Australia and New Zealand. In Dean Tjosvold and Kwok Leung (eds) Leading in High Growth Asia: Managing Relationship for Teamwork and Change 231–50. Singapore: World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812562135_0010

Baxter, Judith (2010) The Language of Female Leadership. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277915

Baxter, Judith (2011) Survival or success? A critical exploration of the use of ‘double-voiced discourse’ by women business leaders in the UK. Discourse and Communication 5(3): 231–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481311405590

Baxter, Judith (2012) Women of the corporation: a sociolinguistic perspective of senior women’s leadership language in the UK. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16(1): 81–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00520.x

Bell, Allan (2016) Succeeding waves: seeking sociolinguistic theory for the twenty-first century. In Nikolas Coupland (ed) Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates 391–416. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107449787.019

Bönisch-Brednich, Brigitte (2008) Watching the Kiwis: New Zealanders’ rules of social interaction - an introduction. Journal of New Zealand Studies 6(7): 3–15.

Brown, R. and Gilman, A. (1960) The pronouns of power and solidarity. In T. A. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language 253–76. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cameron, Deborah (2009) Theoretical issues for the study of gender and spoken interaction. In Pia Pichler and Eva Eppler (eds) Gender and Spoken Interaction 1–17. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280748_1

Carter, Bob and Sealy, Alison (2015) Realist social theory and multilingualism in Europe. European Journal of Applied Linguistics 3(1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2015-0006

Chhokar, Jagdeep S., Brodbek, Felix C., House, Robert J. (eds.) (2007) Culture and Leadership Across the World: The GLOBE Book of In-depth Studies of 25 Societies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Clifton, Jonathan (2012) A discursive approach to leadership: Doing assessments and managing organizational meanings. Journal of Business Communication 49(2): 148–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021943612437762

Connell, Raewyn W. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Connell, Raewyn W. and Messerschmidt, James W. (2005) Hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept. Gender and Society 19(6): 829–59.

Coupland, Nicholas (2001) Introduction: Sociolinguistic theory and social theory. In Nicholas Coupland, Srikant Sarangi and Christopher N. Candlin (eds) Sociolinguistics and Social Theory 1–26. London: Longman.

Eagly, Alice H. and Carli, L. (2007) Through the Labyrinth: The Truth about How Women Become Leaders. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally (2013) Language and Gender (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139245883

Ehrlich, Susan (2008) Sexual assault trials, discursive identities and institutional change. In Rosana Dolón and Júlia Todolí (eds) Analysing Identities in Discourse. 159–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.28.11ehr

Fletcher, Joyce (1999) Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ford, Jackie, Harding, Nancy and Learmonth, Mark (2008) Leadership as Identity: Constructions and Deconstructions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584181

Gumperz, John and Cook-Gumperz, Jenny (2012) Interactional sociolinguistics: perspectives on intercultural communication. In Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling and Elizabeth S. Rangel (eds) Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication 63–76. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118247273.ch4

Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise (2001) Academic women in the male university field: communicative practices at postgraduate seminars. In Bettina Baron and Helga Kotthoff (eds) Gender in Interaction 247–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hello Internet (undated) How to humblebrag. Retrieved on 9 February 2017 from www.hellointernet.fm/how-to-humblebrag.

Heron, Mei (2016) Refugees should have to ‘accept Kiwi values’. Retrieved on 9 February 2017 from www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/306315/refugees-should-have-to-’accept-kiwi-values’.

Hirst, J. (1988) Egalitarianism. In S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith (eds) Australian Cultural History 58–77. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Hirst, John (1998) Egalitarianism. In Graeme Davidson, John Hirst and Stuart McIntire (eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian History 208–9. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Hirst, John (2009) Sense and Nonsense in Australian History. Melbourne: Black Inc.

Holmes, Janet (1986) Functions of you know in women’s and men’s speech. Language in Society 15(1): 1–21.

Holmes, Janet (2006) Gendered Talk at Work: Constructing Gender Identity through Workplace Discourse. Malden, MA: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470754863

Holmes, Janet (in press) Leadership and change management: stereotypes and reality. In Stephanie Schnurr and Cornelia Ilie (eds) Challenging Leadership Stereotypes: Discourse and Power Management. New York: Springer.

Holmes, Janet and Marra, M. (2011a). Leadership discourse in a Maori workplace: negotiating gender, ethnicity and leadership at work. Gender and Language 5(2): 317–42. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v5i2.317

Holmes, Janet and Marra, M. (2011b) Relativity rules: politic talk in ethnicised workplaces. In Bethan L. Davies, Michael Haugh and Andrew J. Merrison (eds) Situated Politeness 27–52. London: Continuum.

Holmes, Janet and Riddiford, Nicky (2010) Professional and personal identity at work: achieving a synthesis through intercultural workplace talk. Journal of Intercultural Communication 22. Retrieved on 9 February 2017 from www.immi.se/intercultural/nr22/holmes.htm.

Holmes, Janet and Stubbe, Maria (2003) Power and Politeness in the Workplace: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Talk at Work. Harlow: Longman.

Holmes, Janet, Marra, M. and Vine, Bernadette (2011) Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holmes, Janet, Marra, M. and Vine, Bernadette (2012) Politeness and impoliteness in ethnic varieties of New Zealand English. Journal of Pragmatics 44(9): 1063–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2011.11.006

Human Rights Commission (2016) Public reporting needed to address gender pay gap. June 30. Retrieved on 9 February 2017 from www.hrc.co.nz/news/public-reporting-needed-address-gender-pay-gap.

Jackson, Brad (2008) Portraying leadership in New Zealand: from modest recognition to contemplative action. In Erin Griffey (ed.) The Power of Portraiture: Portraying Leadership in New Zealand from 1840 to the Present 10–17. Auckland: David Ling.

Jackson, Brad and Parry, Kenneth (2001) The Hero Manager: Learning from New Zealand’s Top Chief Executives. Auckland: Penguin Books.

Jackson, Brad and Parry, Kenneth (2011) A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Leadership (2nd edn). London: Sage.

Kendall, Shari and Tannen, Deborah (1997) Gender and language in the workplace. In Ruth Wodak (ed.) Gender and Discourse 81–105. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250204.n5

Kennedy, Jeffrey C. (2007) Leadership and culture in New Zealand. In Jagdeep S. Chhokar, Felix C. Brodbeck and Robert J. House (eds) Culture and Leadership across the World: The GLOBE Book of In-depth Studies of 25 Societies 397–432. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kirkwood, Jodyanne (2007) Tall Poppy Syndrome: Implications for entrepreneurship in New Zealand. Journal of Management and Organisation 13: 366–85. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1833367200003606

Kluth, Andreas (2009) Tall poppies, crabs and success. Retrieved on 9 February 2017 from http://andreaskluth.org/2009/09/02/tall-poppies-crabs-and-success.

Koenig, Anne M., Eagly, Alice H., Mitchell, Abigail A. and Ristikari, Tina (2011) Are leader stereotypes masculine? A meta-analysis of three research paradigms. Psychological Bulletin 137: 616–42. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023557

Lippitt, John (2004) Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. London: Routledge.

Lipson Leslie ([1948]2011) The Politics of Equality: New Zealand’s Adventures in Democracy. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Liu, Helena, Cutcher, Leanne and Grant, David (2015) Doing authenticity: the gendered construction of authentic leadership. Gender, Work and Organization 22(3): 237–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12073

Marra, Meredith (2008) Recording and analyzing talk across cultures. In Hellen Spencer-Oatey (ed.) Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness (2nd edn) 304–21. London: Continuum.

Marra, Meredith, Vine, Bernadette and Holmes, Janet (2008) Heroes, fathers and good mates: leadership styles of men at work. Paper presented at Power and Place, ANZCA08 Conference, Wellington, New Zealand, July. Retrieved on 9 February 2016 from https://tinyurl.com/zjb6hxg.

McCabe, Darren and Knights, David (2015) Learning to listen? Exploring discourses and images of masculine leadership through corporate videos. Management Learning 47(2): 179–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507615586334

McLeod, Alan L. (1968) The Pattern of New Zealand Culture. New York: Cornell University Press.

Mitchell, Austin (1972) The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise. Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs.

Mouly, Suchitra and Sankaran, Jayaram (2001) The tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand: an exploratory investigation. Working paper no. 222. Auckland, New Zealand: Department of Management Science and Information Systems, University of Auckland.

Mullany, Louise (2007) Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592902

Nielsen, Sabina (2009) Why do top management teams look the way they do? A multilevel exploration of the antecedents of TMT heterogeneity. Strategic Organization 7(3): 277–305. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476127009340496

Nolan, Melanie (2007) The reality and myth of New Zealand egalitarianism: explaining the pattern of a labour historiography at the edge of empires. Labour History Review 72(2): 113–34. https://doi.org/10.1179/174581807X224560

Olssen, Erik, Gri, Clyde and Jones, Frank (2011) An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society 1880–1940. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.

Orsman, Harold W. (1997) The Dictionary of New Zealand English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Osborn, Richard N., Hunt, James G. and Jauch, Lawrence R. (2002) Toward a contextual theory of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly 13: 797–837. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(02)00154-6

Oxley, Harry G. (1974) Mateship in Local Organization: a Study of Egalitarianism, Stratification, Leadership, and Amenities Projects in a Semi-industrial Community of Inland New South Wales. Queensland: University of Queensland Press.

Pearson, David G. (2000) The ties that unwind: civic and ethnic imaginings in New Zealand. Nations and Nationalism 6(1): 91–110. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1354-5078.2000.00091.x

Pearson, Judy C., Turner, Lynn H. and Todd-Mancillas, William R. (1991) Gender and Communication (2nd edn). Dubuque: William C. Brown.

Peeters, Bert (2004a) Tall poppies and egalitarianism in Australian discourse: From keyword to culture value. English World Wide 25(1): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.25.1.02pee

Peeters, Bert (2004b) ‘Thou shalt not be a tall poppy’: describing an Australian communicative (and behavioral) norm. Intercultural Pragmatics 1(1): 71–92. https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2004.008

Peeters, Bert (2015) Tall poppies in the land down under: an applied ethnolinguistic approach. International Journal of Language and Culture 2(2): 219–43. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.2.2.04pee

Rampton, Ben (2016) Foucault, Gumperz and governmentality: interaction, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. In Nikolas Coupland (ed) Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates 303–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rashbrooke, Max (2014) How New Zealand’s rich-poor divide killed its egalitarian paradise. The Guardian (12 December). Retrieved on 9 February 2017 from www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/12/how-new-zealands-richpoor-divide-killed-its-egalitarian-paradise.

Reissner-Roubicek, Sophie (2010). Communication strategies in the behavioural job interview: the influence of discourse norms on graduate recruitment. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Auckland.

Schnurr, Stephanie (2009) Leadership Discourse at Work: Interactions of Humour, Gender and Workplace Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594692

Sealy, Alison (2010) Probabilities and surprises: a realist approach to identifying linguistic and social patterns, with reference to an oral history corpus. Applied Linguistics 31(2): 215–35. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amp023

Sealy, Alison and Carter, Bob (2004) Applied Linguistics as Social Science. London: Bloomsbury.

Sinclair, Amanda (1998) Doing Leadership Differently: Gender, Power and Sexuality in a Changing Business Culture. Victoria: Melbourne University Press.

Stubbe, Maria and Holmes, Janet (1995) You know, eh and other ‘exasperating expressions’: an analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of New Zealand English. Language and Communication 15(1): 63–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(94)00016-6

Tannen, Deborah (ed.) (1993) Framing in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trevor-Roberts, Edwin, Ashkanasy, Neal M. and Kennedy, Jeffrey C. (2003) The egalitarian leader: a comparison of leadership in Australia and New Zealand. Asia Pacific Journal of Management 20(4): 517–40. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026395127290

Wilson, John and Boxer, Diana (2015) (eds) Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Wilson, John and Irwin, Anthea (2015) Why can’t a woman be more like a man? In John Wilson and Diana Boxer (eds) Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders 21–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Wodak, Ruth (2008) Controversial issues in feminist critical discourse analysis. In Kate Harrington, Lia Litosseliti, Helen Sauntson, and Jane Sunderland (eds) Gender and Language Research Methodologies 193–210. London: Palgrave.

Woodhams, Jay (2015) A critical realist study of political identity in Aotearoa New Zealand: materiality, discourse and context. Unpublished PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.