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Doing leadership in the virtual realm has now become a routine part of many leaders’ daily work, yet our understanding of how leadership is enacted in mediated contexts—especially in text-only channels—is very limited. By applying micro-level analysis to naturally occurring instant message conversations, this article exposes the strategies leaders employ to achieve a range of complex communication goals: to get the work done while fostering informality and collegiality and creating the sense of a real—and not virtual—collaboration between team members. The findings further our understanding in two domains: They provide empirical grounding for e-leadership theories by exposing practices from real-life interactions, and they contribute to discursive leadership literature by addressing nonverbal communication practices. The findings of the article could form the basis for management and leadership training by drawing attention to the linguistic and semiotic resources digital leaders have at their disposal in virtual work environments.

This paper makes a case for raising critical language awareness in business communication education and proposes that the development of discourse analytical skills should be made part of management and business communication curricula. As one specific approach to train such awareness and skills, we propose a three-step analytical model to explore agency and action in business discourse and communication. The proposed model draws on organizational discourse scholarship, critical discourse studies and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics, and allows for gaining a better understanding of how agency is assigned in organizational texts. The method draws attention to linguistic and discourse practices and thus helps students to analyze texts more systematically, enables researchers to gain deeper insights into agency and action in organizational discourse, and assists practitioners to reflect on communication processes and consequently to improve their practice and produce texts with more impact. The study is thus part of a broader agenda that sets out out to fully realize the linguistic turn: it promotes an approach that views discourse as central to organizational processes, and by making the analytical framework accessible, it renders the approach easy to adopt by business and management curricula.

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Digital communication technologies led to a revolution in how people interact at work: relying on computer-mediated communication technologies is now a must, rather than an alternative. This empirical study investigates how colleagues in a virtual team use synchronous online communication platform in the workplace. Inspired by the conceptualisation of web-based communication platforms as tool, place or context of social construction, we explore the discursive strategies that contribute to the construction of the team’s shared sense of purpose and identity, a collegial atmosphere and consequently lead to effective collaboration. The close analyses of real-life data from a multinational workplace provide insights into the everyday communication practices of virtual team members. Our findings supplement organisational literature based on etic observations of the effectiveness of virtual work and provide a basis for further theorisations about how communication technologies affect the ecology of and discourse practices in computer-mediated communication at work.