What say you? : A Rhetorical Analysis of the Discourse of Business Leaders

Abstract: Leadership is a broad topic that can be studied from a vast amount of angles and perspectives. The same fact is true for communication. This study combines these two concepts as it directs attention towards discursive analysis of business leaders. With this focus, the purpose is to describe the essence of rhetoric as an essential part of business communication, analyze how business leaders perform leadership through communication and to contribute to further understanding of this subject, by explaining the communication of business leaders through rhetorical analysis. To reach as far as possible within this research a theoretical framework, that will be the support for the analysis, is established as a basis on which an analysis is possible. This framework reviews the important concepts that are essential for understanding the means of the following rhetorical analysis. To analyze the textual communication of business leaders extracted from real life cases, narratives from situations where leadership is practiced have been selected based on certain criteria. The findings of this study are in unity with the direction in which this research aims. The way business leaders communicate in situations where leadership is practiced have an immense impact on how they are perceived as leaders. Therefore it is argued that business leaders should put more emphasis on increasing their understanding of how they are perceived by others, based on the way they communicate through verbal communication.