City Research Online

Abstract

We identify managers' meta‐level talk about the positive purpose, meaning, and significance of their actions as an overlooked type of leadership behaviour and call it leadership meta‐talk. We outline why leadership meta‐talk is not necessarily truthful or deceptive, but selective and loosely coupled with leadership practice. We discuss varieties of leadership meta‐talk, namely aspirational, sub‐texting, and sensemaking meta‐talk, as well as principled, situational, formulaic, and casual meta‐talk. We show how all varieties of leadership meta‐talk draw people's attention to positive aspects of leadership practice and provide positive interpretations of it. Thus, leadership meta‐talk can positively influence attributions of leadership and portray workplaces as overly harmonious and well‐ordered, masking power imbalances and tensions and creating a quantitative and qualitative talking‐doing gap. We argue that these talking‐doing gaps are systemic rather than pathological features of the contemporary workplace because overly positive leadership meta‐talk responds to systemic pressures and opportunities for managers and provides egocentric, psycho‐relational, and public‐image benefits. In contrast, leadership practice that lives up to leadership meta‐talk is more costly, difficult, and time‐consuming than commonly assumed. Our theory reconciles attributional, behavioural, and romancing views of leadership, and offers new insights into key organizational and societal challenges, including managing healthy workplace expectations.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	attributions, leadership, leadership behaviors, leadership meta-talk, romance of leadership, talking-doing gap
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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