Māori workplace language research revealed
victoria-university-of-wellington
Fri Jul 31 2009 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Māori workplace language research revealed
Friday, 31 July 2009, 10:16 am
Press Release: Victoria University of Wellington
Māori workplace language research revealed during Māori Language Week
As Aotearoa celebrates Māori Language Week, a three-year study by Victoria University has identified some differences between the language of leaders in Māori and Pākehā organisations.
Victoria’s Language in the Workplace team focused on understanding what drives different styles of leadership in the workplace, particularly the language of leadership in Māori and Pākehā organisations.
Project Director Professor Janet Holmes says the research, which was funded by a Marsden Grant, looked at how ethnicity and culture influence people’s use of language and patterns of interaction at work, as well as their leadership style, by analysing and comparing the language used by effective Māori and Pākehā leaders in different workplaces.
“Four organisations were used as case studies – two oriented to creative media-type outputs, the other two oriented to knowledge work and negotiation. One in each industry was defined as having Māori goals, working for Māori people with tikanga (traditional customs and values) playing a key role in everyday operations,” says Professor Holmes.
The research, which recorded and analysed the daily communication processes and strategies used by leaders, showed interesting similarities based on ethnicity and sector.
“Interactions in the two Māori organisations indicated an awareness of the importance of humility, and a tendency to emphasise the group over the individual. Māori workplaces also enriched the notion of co-leadership by exploring how ‘cultural leadership’ plays an influential role in these organisations.”
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Professor Holmes says workplace meetings provided many examples of subtly different patterns of interaction between Māori and Pākehā organisations.
“In Māori culture when someone is speaking, there is often a low level of murmuring, indicating not boredom or inattention, as it might in the Pākehā context, but rather engagement, as people express their reactions to what the speaker is saying.
In one Māori organisation, a recently appointed Pākehā complained that staff weren’t listening attentively when he presented his report, until a colleague explained to him that Māori rules of speaking prevailed in that particular workplace.”
The team’s research has sparked considerable international interest and the findings will be published next year by Oxford University Press in a book entitled Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity.
ENDS
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