Modifications of Formal Leadership in Office Employees' Communication

The study focuses on the phenomenon of formal leadership among office employees. The institutional approach, which still predominates in formal leadership studies, focuses on the stable roles of actors corresponding to hierarchical positions. The emergence of uncertainties arising in organizational relations during everyday working interactions becomes a key problem for the development and clarification of the sociological understanding of concept of formal leadership. The study fills the gap in sociological knowledge about this phenomenon, applying the ethnomethodological view of working interactions. According to this approach, the influence and products of institutional structures can be traced in the process of interactions of employees of the organization, where the conversation of the subjects is considered. Conversation analysis is applied in order to identify the essence of working communication and communicative patterns used in online interactions by formal leaders. The study finds that conversations' participants jointly produce an understanding of the formal leader (leadership-in-action), where the latter is assigned more communicative strategies for changing the structure and sequence of working interaction.