Leaderspeak – An Evolutionary Psychology Approach to Reducing Gaps in Strategic Communication

ABSTRACT

The gaps that strategic communication has to bridge have widened due to competing values driven by self-interest versus superordinate organizational goals. We propose a higher-order comprehensive model, grounded in a) the social behavioral aspects of evolutionary psychology and strategic communication; b) evolutionary game theory reciprocity; and c) the niche construction of leadership. We offer the concept of ‘leaderspeak’, which brings into effect the concepts of collaborative and mutually beneficial relations, altruism, spite, and selfishness. In this paper, we seek to parse the role of reciprocity, altruism, and how receivers are motivated to respond to leader communication (leaderspeak, i.e., leader communication that considers all the multi-modal affordances of language, including non-verbal communication, to outline the intent of the leader). This is an initial attempt to delve deeper into the evolving human need while ensuring reciprocity between the sender and receiver. Our aim is to understand and address the attitude, “I hear you, and get what you want me to do for you, so what’s in it for me?”

Introduction

Strategic communication has largely been studied and practiced in the context of internal and external interactions with stakeholders and in alignment with the organizational mission, vision, and strategy to enhance its strategic positioning (Argenti et al., 2005). Strategic communication when viewed as “a conscious, planned, and ongoing endeavor by organizations to improve cooperation and reduce conflict, with an end goal to create a receptive environment in which the organization’s products or services can be marketed” (Bainbridge et al., 2011) situates the focus on the leader’s ability to instill collaboration to achieve the superordinate goals of the organization. That would imply that both the leader and the led would need to look beyond their own needs and meet midway to achieve the goals of the organization. This outcome then presupposes organizational leaders and members must draft and craft communication pieces (utterances, text, mail, voice, or other multimedia snippets) that seek to position the organization in the best light possible in the eyes, ears, and minds of their stakeholders. In response, stakeholders seek to a) use the communication directed at them to identify what needs to be done for that context; b) understand the purpose behind the communication; c) understand how well or not it is aligned with the stated organizational objectives; and d) understand if it seems to be in competition with their own professional values.

The point of strategic communication research is to “study how the specific and peculiar mind of this eusocial hunter-gatherer is manipulated today, for good or bad, by fellow hunter-gatherers in privileged social positions” (Nothhaft, 2016, p. 80). Since the human mind is primarily shaped by the ancestral environment or the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), it is critical to understand when strategic communication is used to convince others to cooperate versus manipulating, exploiting, or coercing them to align with one’s idea, goal, or vision (Nothhaft, 2016, p. 82). Similarly, when existing groups witness random acts of selflessness, reciprocity and altruism that defy explanations, it would be helpful to understand if it was a result of the group’s norms or the words of the leader (Nothhaft, 2016; Pinker, 2012).

This directly brings into play the concept of ‘niche construction’ of an organization’s leader (Spisak et al., 2015). The need to understand the reasons that led to formal leadership becoming stabilized in human culture, with its strategies evolving into current modern structures, sparked explorations of game theory-based concepts (Spisak et al., 2015). This exploration gave rise to questions such as, “Why and when agents sacrifice immediate self-interest for the sake of the group, even when payoffs gained from the sacrifice asymmetrically favour the leader?” (Spisak et al., 2015, p. 296). It was found that the connection between the niche construction in the organization and formal leadership processes which favor varying degrees of reciprocity versus retribution to sustain followership investment (Spisak et al., 2015) is consistent with the game theoretic approach and the essence of evolutionary psychology in terms of the payoffs, survival, reciprocity, defection, or exit choices in any given context.

Reciprocity is broadly understood as an equal exchange between two entities such as followers and leaders who may wish to elicit a specific response from the receivers of organizational communication episodes (written, oral, or other). To understand how messages are received, filtered (in/out), interpreted, and responded to, we turn to fundamental human motivations, which, when accurately applied, may further enhance the efficacy of the strategic communication message outputted by organizational leaders. Fundamental human motives that have evolved over millennia and are imprinted in our evolutionary nature and nurture practices – practices such as evading physical harm, avoiding diseases, making friends, attaining status, acquiring a mate, keeping a mate, and caring for a family – show that the motive of kin care is a deeply wired human motivation (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013).

Once activated, the motive of kin care makes humans invest more in others who are perceived as family. It increases trust, nurturance, and unconditional reciprocation. Such behaviors confound typical game theoretic approaches and lend credence to the evolutionary game theory angle. This perspective provides the context around how a leader can move people beyond self-interest and spite, to altruism, reciprocity, and eventually collaboration. In this aspect, what the leader says and speaks, is at the core of strategic communication, which is the “purposeful use of communication by an entity to engage in conversation of strategic significance to its goals” (Zerfass et al., 2018, p. 487) – thus, emphasizing that communication can indeed play a distinctive role for the formulation, revision, presentation, execution, implementation, and operationalization of strategies (Zerfass et al., 2018). This means that the niche construction driven by fundamental motives rests on communication as a leadership function.

Given the natural evolution of people, their need for communicating with one another, and their adaptability to situations and technologies, we will explore this in the context of evolutionary game theory (Maynard Smith & Price, 1973). Heeding Seiffert-Brockmann's (2018) call to delve deeper into the evolving human need while ensuring reciprocity between the sender and receiver, we combine game theoretic concepts with evolutionary psychology and see if evolutionary game theory (EGT) can indeed shed light on human interactions with strategic communication or whether it provides a backdrop for such interactions. Therefore, we will first review evolutionary game theory and its impact on strategic communication to establish the context. We next invoke speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Burke, 1966; Searle, 1975) to explain the evolution and nature of utterances and, building on the work of Spisak et al. (2015), discuss the process of reciprocity to build the comprehensive model of strategic communication anchoring it in ethical elements founded on the motivational language theory (Mayfield et al., 2015).

Evolutionary game theory and strategic communication

Evolutionary game theory (Maynard Smith, 1992; Maynard Smith & Price, 1973) merges population ecology with game theory while focusing on the dynamics of strategy change (Newton, 2018). It is often influenced by the frequency of competing strategies in the population. To reconcile the paradox of when selection occurs at the individual level and self-interest is rewarded but working for the common good is not, Maynard Smith (1992) took recourse to evolutionary game theory to explain ritualized behavior, primarily in animals and in adversarial situations. This can be reflected in organizational settings when messages from senior leaders contradict internal organizational practices. In such cases organizational members seek to sift the message to see where their self-interests are best preserved and protected and if any threat is overtly or subtly conveyed in the message. “What’s in it for me” is the dominant motif that motivates organizational members to do (or not to do).

The research found that players playing the game needed to have a strategy but did not require to think or act rationally. Players could evaluate alternative strategies that would allow them to ensure their survival and continue to play the game (Maynard Smith, 1992; Maynard Smith & Price, 1973). In an organizational setting, employees often take the approach of doing just enough to ensure that their managers see them as having contributed, but no more than what is required, and on occasion, just a bit more so as not to be seen as being carried by others. In today’s post-pandemic workspace, “Quiet Quitting”, where Gen Z workers state that they do not wish to do ‘extra’ (Mundie, 2022), is one example of such a survival mechanism that is a newly evolved workplace behavior. Quiet quitting is a workplace behavior that has evolved out of the long pandemic hours that people have put in, leading to burnout. Leaders would benefit by recognizing such a development at their workplaces and seek to address this directly and provide the necessary support to help their employees stay motivated.

Maynard Smith (1992) would call this strategy by the employees successful whilst being compared to other competing strategies. The essence of game theory and evolutionary game theory is the payoff, which can vary in degrees or quantities. In an organizational setting, each time employees use a particular strategy to stay employed, they must do so keeping in mind the payoffs that come in performance units. These are customs, mores, and managerial decisions. The concept of payoff would apply equally to any strategic decision taken by management and the buy-in they would require from organizational stakeholders (Spisak et al., 2015). Evolutionary game theory has enabled the resolution of many counter-intuitive situations in the fields of group selection, sexual selection, altruism, parental care, co-evolution, and ecological dynamics (Hammerstein & Selten, 1994). Thus, strategic communication based on evolutionary game theory becomes a critical approach that management or organizational leaders can learn about and adopt.

Evolutionary game theorists propose a social behavior model for understanding human behavior because other games, like the Hawk-Dove or the War of Attrition, do not allow for social artifacts to enter the game scenario. According to the model, players (employees/competitors) can have up to four possible ways to be involved in a strategic interaction (Foresman, 2012). The four alternatives are:

1. Cooperative or mutualistic relationship between the donor and the recipient. Both gain or benefit by using a particular strategy.

2. Altruistic relationship, where the donor provides a benefit to the recipient, at a cost to the donor. If the recipient reciprocates in a similar manner, then you can see true altruism or reciprocal altruism.

3. Spite is the opposite of altruism and in essence depicts a possible scenario when the donor and recipient aid or provide a benefit to a third person, at a cost to themselves, to spite the donor or recipient.

4. Selfishness, considered to be the base criteria for all strategies, i.e., self-interest to survive, replicate, and continue in the game is the core motivation for any game player.

In an organizational context, leaders and followers also seek to survive and be in the game (be employed). Thus, self-interest, or “what’s in it for me” is the prime motivator. Thus, we must understand how the donor (organizational leader) can motivate recipients (stakeholders) beyond their self-interests or spite, towards reciprocity (altruism) and cooperation, to achieve the objectives of the game (the organizational success). These four states that players can be in, as donors and recipients (leader and stakeholder), can lead to states of defection, continuous survival, resettling of the population with various numbers of co-operators, altruists, or lead to a steady state for periods of time (Sigmund & Nowak, 1999).

Embedded in the evolutionary game theory approach is the evolution of the human psyche which, it is theorized, evolved four mechanisms that help us (humans) move from self-interest to spite to altruistic and cooperative behavior. Further, in the organizational (or familial, communal, or societal) settings, what we hear, know, perceive, understand, and act on, depends on the sender, the medium, the language, and the intent of what was heard, known, perceived, understood, and acted upon. The four mechanisms and the process communication aspects of evolutionary game theory thus provide the backdrop for the discussion around the role of leader communication and evolutionary psychology in effective strategic communication.

To comprehend such complex behaviors, we are bound to muster multiple perspectives and we intend to do these in the subsequent sections as we lay out the broad framework for effective strategic communication. In the next section we discuss speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Burke, 1966; Searle, 1975). Speech act theory can provide key indicators for leadership communication. Briefly, the four acts are 1) the utterance Act, 2) the propositional Act, 3) the illocutionary Act, and 4) the perlocutionary Act. We will explain each of these in the subsequent sections. Following the discussion of speech act theory, we present the concept of reciprocity (Lotem et al., 2003), in order to discuss the move from reciprocity to unconditional altruism through signaling benefits. Spisak et al. (2015, p. 298) state that “management will need to maintain reciprocal relationships with multiple subgroups and individuals across the organization if they wish to construct a flatter, cooperative niche, allow for prosocial leadership process, consisting of emotional empathy and other affiliative traits to support multiple streams of reciprocity”. In a first step, we elaborate on the concept of leaderspeak (Sundararajan, 2016), which is a placeholder word to depict the language that leaders use when they communicate to internal and external stakeholders. Finally, we anchor the extracted concepts in ethical and values-based (even values-lived) approaches (Bhartṛhari, 1965/1996), under the paradigm offered by the motivational language theory (Mayfield et al., 2015). These values are critical when a leader communicates strategically, as they can give rise to more cooperative and altruistic behaviors in the organization, better buy-in for leaders’ strategic decisions regarding the organization’s progress, and overall, a more conducive environment for organizational denizens to occupy and play the game.

Speech act theory

Communication studies have long derived thoughts, ideas, practices, and theories from the classic communication model and others that followed it, all consisting of the source (sender), receiver, channel, noise, and feedback (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). The basic idea of this model still holds value. However, changing times, contexts, and expectations of communicators and receivers (at individual, group, organizational, and societal levels) have demanded that each of these entities change how they produce, receive, and interpret messages. If an individual or organization is expected to respond to any message, then the capacity of the individual or entity to receive, hold, process, decode, interpret, and respond to the message becomes a critical factor to consider when any sender is devising a message. Such care is required for any strategic, business, or professional communication to be considered effective.

Evolutionary psychology at the core of evolutionary game theory provides variability in the intent of the communicator, but to capture the way that information is diffused through language we turn to speech act theory. Speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Burke, 1966; Searle, 1975) has been employed by Mayfield et al. (2015, p. 18) to explore the social exchange process to demonstrate how the leader’s strategic vision influences and shapes the major methods for augmenting motivational language diffusion through the organization. The theory also shows how this improves the communication of values and vision to the organizational stakeholders.

Speech act theory thus supplements the evolutionary game theory model by adding four acts of communication. The four acts are 1) the utterance act – what is said or written; 2) the propositional act or assertion; 3) the illocutionary act – the meaning or intention of what is said or written; and 4) the perlocutionary act – designed to have an actual effect on the receiver’s (reader’s) behavior. While the analytical categories appear simple, language in practice is by no means trivial. Language is selective, abstract, is emotionally loaded, and can create a diversion or separation (Burke, 1966). Early results from content analysis of management and organizational leaders’ press releases about sustainability, have shown co-occurrence of the propositional and perlocutionary acts (speech act theory components), in addition to similarity and inclusive language (social identity framing components), and positive social identity language (Nothhaft, 2016).

While this supplementation offers the way in which the intent may manifest from the leader, studies show the need to shift the focus to the receiver side as well. Followers were shown to relate more with the leader and the leader’s vision for change when the leader used a combination of inclusive and positive social identity language, which increased the self-esteem of the followers (Seyranian, 2014).

The bidirectionality of the need to implement a stakeholder-involvement strategy based on the language and dialogue as outlined in recent studies (Cornelissen, 2014; Mayfield et al., 2015; Seyranian, 2014) then relates back to the concept of reciprocity between the sender and receiver. In the organizational setting, it is between the leader and stakeholders to whom the leader wishes to convey a certain message with a view to eliciting a specific response (perlocutionary). This brings in the aspect of reciprocity, both in the sense discussed by Spisak et al. (2015) as well as in the sense utilized by evolutionary game theory. A mere utterance or proposition by an organizational leader is an indication to the receiver that the organization requires them to respond (even if that communication is purely informational and a lack of response is also a response). With this understanding, we highlight the importance of perlocutionary speech in our model and continue to include the concepts of bidirectionality in relation to reciprocity and leaderspeak in the next sections.

Reciprocity and leaderspeak

We now turn to the concept of reciprocity and then introduce the leader communication concept we call ‘leaderspeak’ (Sundararajan, 2016).

Reciprocity

As leaders aim for collaborative behaviors through strategic communication, the evolution of unconditional altruism is viewed as a costly signal of individual quality because of reciprocal altruism (Lotem et al., 2003). For instance, based on a multitype evolutionary game theory, donating of time, money, or resources can exceed the cost for some individuals when compared to the benefits they receive when donating, particularly in a high-quality state. For those players in a low-quality state, who have not yet reached that level of ability to donate (time, money, or resources in the game), this act of donating can prove to be costly. In such cases the population possesses an evolutionarily stable strategy allowing the high-quality individuals to cooperate unconditionally, leaving the low-quality individuals to either defect or play tit-for-tat (Lotem et al., 2003). This indicates that there could be a state of stable generosity enjoyed or exhibited by high-quality individuals who no longer fear future reciprocation or punishment. To understand the concept of reciprocity, we provide the following example: If organizational stakeholders fail to respond and reciprocate to leader communication about some initiative, they can expect some retributive or punitive action. This would force them to conditionally reciprocate and avoid a future reciprocal action (retributive) from the leader. Since such situations can threaten the survival of the individual in the organization, self-interest takes hold to motivate them to reciprocate positively (if not altruistically) to the leader’s communication, requiring a specific response or action. Humans will tend to use their attentional, attitudinal, and attenuating filters to selectively offload signals and noise onto the language itself, to avoid cognitively overloading their limited capacities to process information (Dror & Harnad, 2008). But, being accustomed to a leader or manager’s language will allow them to recognize the signals (verbal and non-verbal) and reciprocate accordingly. This offloading can occur at the cognitive level, but equally at the emotional (affective offloading) and attentional (attentional offloading) levels, where cognitive, affective, and attentional cues will determine what the receiver filters, attenuates, or responds to when receiving the leader’s message. We provide a very specific example of this behavior to further elucidate this concept.

Email from a leader to an organizations' internal stakeholders

Sub: Diversity Training and Sensitivity Workshop

Dear Colleagues,

Shortly we will embark on our yearlong process to learn about unconscious biases, systemic biases, and cultural biases in our upcoming series on diversity, inclusion, and sensitivity training. I would like all of us to be part of this process and we seek to work collectively and collaboratively to make this a great place for all of us to work and thrive.

Thank you.

(Name of the leader)

Possible receiver responses to this message could be the following:

• Employee with no filters – Great! I love to be part of this.

• Employee with Attentional Filters – Hmm! Doesn’t apply to me. I am never biased.

• Employee with Affective Filters – These workshops never work. People are always going to be biased. I have faced the brunt of biased comments about me, my background, my beliefs, and these workshops are not going to change my experience.

• Employee with Attitudinal Filters – Oh no! When will the organization stop doing this. Now these other people will get all the benefits and I am going to be left behind. What can I do, I’ll just play along and keep my job.

The example above presents only a few possible responses to a leaderspeak utterance. There will be many variations of these responses as each person employs a different set of filters based on their own lived experiences within and outside an organization. Next, we see how the leaderspeak originates with the four speech acts and in response to reciprocity, how it closes the loop to ensure effective strategic communication.

Leaderspeak

While others have referred to what leaders say and how they say the things they say as ‘leader talk’ or ‘leader oral communication’ (Mayfield et al., 2015), leaderspeak (Sundararajan, 2016) purports to be all-inclusive and considers all the multi-modal affordances of language, including non-verbal communication, to outline the intent of the leader. Leaderspeak comprises the reasons for employing language with a view to eliciting certain responses and behaviors in the receivers. Thus, if leadership is the process of influencing, inspiring or directing others towards goal achievement, then leaderspeak is the set of communication strategies leaders use in their effort to lead people towards stated organizational objectives. These strategies include what leaders say, how and why they say it, through what medium, to what purpose (intent or illocutionary speech act), and to what effect (perlocutionary speech act). Leaderspeak can be outlined in the following five ways, which we present as propositions:

1. Proposition 1: Leaderspeak occurs when leaders employ strategic language and communication, informed by evolutionary psychology perspectives, to persuade (expectation of some reciprocal response from employees).

2. Proposition 2: Leaderspeak occurs when leaders employ strategic language and communication, informed by evolutionary psychology perspectives, to assert, exude, and emanate power (implying the expectation of a level of conditional reciprocity).

3. Proposition 3: Leaderspeak occurs when leaders employ strategic language and communication, informed by evolutionary psychology perspectives, to assure, empathize, and convince (implying the expectation of unconditional reciprocity, possibly even unconditional altruism). Here the leaderspeak will consist of both logos (logic) and pathos (emotion).

4. Proposition 4: Leaderspeak occurs when leaders employ strategic language and communication using rhetorical devices (e.g., metaphors) and other association strategies (social identity framing), informed by evolutionary psychology perspectives, to convey their message (implying the expectation of unconditional reciprocity, possibly even unconditional altruism as an outcome of stable generosity).

5. Proposition 5: Leaderspeak occurs when leaders employ strategic language and communication, informed by evolutionary psychology perspectives, to elicit certain responses from their stakeholders to aid (or at the least, not impede) in the execution of the leader’s strategic vision (implying an expectation of both conditional and unconditional reciprocity).

The leader engages in leaderspeak that employs language to elicit a response from the receiver that aims to address the receiver's self-interest. It indicates to the stakeholder that spiteful behavior is not welcome. It leads the stakeholder towards cooperative or altruistic relationships. Leaderspeak will begin with the utterance act and, as seen above, situate and settle in the perlocutionary act. This is consistent with all acceptable forms of classical and modern definitions of rhetoric, as the art of persuasion consists of logos (logic), pathos (emotion), and ethos (ethics). The above five propositions can apply to any language and communication employed by an organization, or individual, but takes on special purport when employed by someone in a position of authority and power. However, when either individuals, groups or organizations divorce themselves from the third aspect of rhetorical speech/communication, ethos (ethics), then outcomes for individuals, groups, and organizations will vary depending on the situation, but they are usually not beneficial to the common good. We thus look at why leaderspeak must be anchored in ethical thought.

Anchoring in ethical speech: from motivational language theory to Bhartṛhari

For leaderspeak to be seen, viewed, heard, and perceived to be genuine, the leader needs to walk the talk as highlighted by the motivational language theory (Mayfield et al., 2015). Together with speech act theory, using the motivational language theory helps to understand how “the diffusion of motivating language use can be enhanced throughout the organization” (Mayfield et al., 2015, p. 113), and how this improves the communication of the values and vision to the organizational stakeholders. But most importantly, leaders must first be anchored in ethical values before they delve into communicating the vision and values to their employees. If leaders are unsure of their values, this uncertainty will be reflected in all their communications. Any inconsistency will deplete trust and the leader’s communications may seem undependable, unfounded, unpredictable, and therefore unclear. Since affective and cognitive filters impact the perception of the message received, the lack of ethical grounding in the leader’s speech may result in misperceived and misplaced anger in the receivers, leading to non-responses or impulsive responses, as opposed to thoughtful reciprocity.

For specific ethical values related to communication, we turn to the Upanishads and Bhartṛhari’s ethical principles. We select them for two reasons. 1) When it comes to understanding the choices based on a human’s will, Schopenhauer asks ethicists to go beyond Kantian-based ethics to the teachings of the Upanishads¹ which he described as the production of the highest human wisdom. 2) The aptness of Bhartṛhari’s definition of ethics makes it highly applicable to this model. According to Bhartṛhari, ethics is a combination of rituals (influenced by the place, time, and group you identify with) and the values and attitudes one has towards others (Bhartṛhari, 1965). This definition is directly in alignment with the very premise of this paper regarding the evolution of the human mind, which has been shaped by the ancestral environment or the environment of evolutionary adaptedness when humans lived in small groups (Nothhaft, 2016).

Bhartṛhari found that as a leader, when you have power, position, and control, the more patience and accommodation you show, the greater will be the willingness on the part of followers to listen to you. From the evolutionary perspective, humans can make choices. One must thus learn to make one’s mind sensitive and calm. If the leader has lived and espoused the right values, then this will allow for improved followership investment (Spisak et al., 2015), and help leaders overcome or pierce through the attitudinal filters of the listeners (audiences, followers) with an objective, yet compassionate mind. Any resulting communication will be, by default, only ethical in its intent and speech. Such an approach then delineates rhetoric and communication borne out of it as the “art of ethical choice in all private and public affairs”, as the Greek philosopher Isocrates (436–336 BCE) called it (Isocrates, 1928, n.p.). “Rhetoric is an outward feeling and inward thought of not merely expression, but reason, feeling, and imagination” and “that endowment of our human nature which raises us above mere animality and enables us to live the civilized life” (Isocrates, 1928, n.p.).

A leader’s attitude is expressed through their speech, which can be sensed in their tone, form, and decibel level. Founded on the importance of values required for a sustainable social infrastructure, ethical speech is shown to have four features namely, 1) it is truthful; 2) it is not hurtful; 3) it is respectful, with compassion and kindness, keeping in mind the well-being of the other; and 4) it is beneficial to the other person. All four are equally important. This means it is not enough if one or two alone are taken into consideration for it to be ethical. Leaving even one of the above four out will lead to unethical or harmful speech creating communication gaps due to misaligned goals, intents, and speech. For instance, under the guise of being brutally honest many claim they are being truthful and ethical. But that is not truly ethical speech because blind, uncontrolled, and uncensored speech can become hurtful to others which falls under unethical speech. Or in other instances, leaders may want to downsize and when they communicate this, they may be respectful, compassionate, and kind but may be tempted to hide the truth and manipulate the receivers into creating reports that show low operational efficiency, only to use that very report against the same employees to downsize their division. This goes back to Nothhaft’s statement on “how the specific and peculiar mind of the eusocial hunter-gatherer is manipulated or used by other hunter-gatherers in privileged social positions” (2016). Here, the communication may have been kind and the rhetoric collaborative and respectful, but not only was the intent hidden, making the speech untruthful, but the communication was not beneficial to the other person. The speech act or the communication act that is now perlocutionary, expecting to elicit a specific response from the receiver, is intended to deceive, as opposed to truly empathize and create benefit for the receiver.

Most often the temptation to refrain from ethical speech may arise due to a need by leaders to avoid backlash or questioning. Instead, if leaders stand by the truth, even though there may be immediate backlash, according to Bhartṛhari (1965), in the long term the leader’s honesty will pay off. From the evolutionary psychology and game theory perspective, this payoff for the leader is motivation for the leader to continue to live their ethical values in speech and action. For instance, adapting Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) definition of agency to the context of evolutionary psychology, we see human agency forming the foundation of ethical leaderspeak. The need to be ethical is derived from an understanding that human agency – in this case, leaderspeak –, is iteratively evolved through information from the past into a temporally embedded process of social engagement which is oriented toward the future and the present to contextualize the past habits (or habitual orientations) and future projects within the contingencies of the moment. Given that the leader’s past actions inform their present engagement, followers will be making a note every time the leader deviates from being truthful, understanding, and compassionate when resolving problems or conflicts, or addressing contextual needs. Any justification may not appease the minds of the followers (Vididtatmanandaji, 2014) when they are called to engage in work following a deviation. It would be very difficult to rebuild trust once it is lost.

We thus put forward the sixth proposition involving leaderspeak and strategic communication, as follows:

(6) Proposition 6: Ethical Leaderspeak occurs when leaders employ strategic language and communication, informed by evolutionary psychology perspectives, anchored in ethical principles, to elicit genuine responses from the followers and increase followership investment.

Leaderspeak, managerspeak, and organizational speak

Figure 1 shows the interplay of utterances, reciprocity and leaderspeak anchored in ethical speech to guide the ‘eusocial hunter-gatherer’ into both guarded and guided behaviors to suit a group’s cultural and social norms and expectations. The comprehensive interplay presents an effective strategic communication model grounded in the evolution of human nature that addresses how ethical leaderspeak can counter the core human motivation of fear for survival and self-interest, and transform it into more meaningful and even selfless responses to one’s leader.

Figure 1. Interplay of speech act theory, reciprocity, and leaderspeak anchored in motivational language and ethical speech founded on the principles of evolutionary psychology highlighting effective and ethical strategic communication.

The distance here plays a critical role, in that if the organization does have hierarchy, then the managerspeak will coerce organizational actors to conditionally reciprocate (intent based on past settings of the selective attention filters). Managerspeak is often mimetic of leaderspeak; it will be perceived to be perlocutionary (what do they want from me or what do they want me to do). This will then go down in the organizational canon as organizationspeak, “when they say, we do, no questions asked”. When there exists such an organizational climate, then all the attentional filters of the organizational receivers (employees, direct reports, etc.) are now attuned to select those cues that will allow employees to respond in time, for fear of negative reciprocation. Such a climate will not be able to foster unconditional reciprocity, let alone altruistic behavior of any kind. It will continue to keep employees and other organizational actors in the realm of conditional reciprocity. The interconnectivity of these aspects is reflected in the framework presented in Figure 1, in the blocks that sit on either side of the “reciprocity/altruism” block, with the organizational or leaderspeak on one side and “Me/Us/Them” on the other side, leading from self-interest to cooperative behavior. Thus, anchored in ethical thinking, the leader can ensure effective strategic communication that can work to override self-interest and have the organizational members/followers work towards cooperative work relationships for the greater good and consequently increasing followership investment (Spisak et al., 2015). In the next section, we will bring all the moving parts of the framework together by parsing a strategic communication statement by an organizational leader using different lenses.

Leaderspeak or strategic leader communication for change – a case approach

Effective strategic communication requires leaderspeak to be clear, accurate, ethical, and inclusive as well as interpreted accurately. This will ensure timely and useful responses from the receiver, while being aware of the receiver’s past experiences, present state of being, and expectations of future orientations (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). The many moving parts in the process begin with the intent of the leader, the form and appropriateness of her communication, and culminate with the perception and intent of the receiver. To further explain the framework illustrated in Figure 1, we will start with a specific instance of leaderspeak in the context of organizational change. The following is a statement spoken by a senior organizational leader (CEO, Dean, Minister, etc.) and we will parse the leaderspeak using the lenses of speech act theory, motivational language theory, ethics, and reciprocity.

Initial leaderspeak: “We are going to restructure the organization and make it more sustainable and relevant to the future needs and aspirations of all our stakeholders. I, therefore, want all of you to pitch in and join the effort in this change project. The strategy document will be devised in consultation with all of you and I can get things started. I am ready to roll up my sleeves and lift this if all of you are with me.”

Parsing from the perspectives of speech act theory anchored in motivational language theory and ethics

An entire statement is an act of utterance and pronunciation, and since the senior leader has said it, this ensures it makes it through the first line of filters of the receivers. We are inherently conditioned to listen to what our bosses say and tend to pay attention (in the evolutionary psychology sense, we listen to the leader of the group for survival), for the statement may have something that involves us or needs us to respond or do something. Let us now see how each segment of the leaderspeak statement (sentences) corresponds to each type of speech act.

“We are going to restructure the organization … ” is the propositional act and is a clear assertion that the decision to restructure has been taken. The rest of the sentence, “ … and … stakeholders”, takes the form of motivational and inclusive language. It is inclusive with the use of “we”, “all our stakeholders”; motivational when it lays out the vision, “relevant to future needs and aspirations”.

These two statements are both illocutionary and perlocutionary, meaning exactly what is said as well as eliciting a specific response: I am doing it, will you? The leader is clear in what they are asking from the employees: “ … pitch in and join the effort in this change project.” The leader is also being ethical and transparent when they say, “I am ready, are you … .” The prospect of being consulted in the process is another piece of motivational language, which indicates to the receiver (organizational members) that their voices are important, will be listened to, and the strategy will be developed based on the input received from organizational members.

Motivational language theory and ethicality will work together in this case because the leader is saying what she wish-es to be doing, asking the organizational members to work with her as they begin the consultation process, followed by whatever the change process yields. The leader indicates that she will continue to work with everyone to implement sustainable practices in the organization to meet current and future needs and aspirations.

We now look to evolutionary psychology 1] to see if the leader’s past actions allows her to stay on the ethical path and impact these proposed future changes; and 2] to look at the receiver’s (organizational member) past actions and motivations that will lead them to receive, interpret, and act per the organizational rules (or rules of the game).

Parsing from the perspectives of evolutionary psychology

In this case, all strategic communication will need to be perlocutionary, as the communication seeks to achieve or elicit specific responses from the receivers. The leaderspeak statement above viewed from the evolutionary psychological perspective will reveal the motivations and payoffs for the leader.

The leader has asserted that the organization “will” restructure, “will” consult broadly, and “will” do the work along with the members. The payoffs for the leader if the change project succeeds is bragging rights that they are now a ‘change leader’. This implies that they are adept at change management, strategic thinking, and ethics. This fulfils their goal of improving the organization in the eyes of all stakeholders (the greater good). These are born out of self-interest. But, since the leader is thinking of the big picture and the greater good, they seek to lead their organizational members towards reciprocity (“I am doing it, will you?”) and eventually, a collaborative or cooperative relationship (“ … want you all to join the effort, pitch in, participate in the consultations, and we work towards organizational and stakeholder aspirations”). This approach will only work if the leader’s past, habitual actions, and present decision-making have been consistent, and they have been working towards the betterment of the organization and its future. This consistency can only occur if the leader has been grounded in ethical thinking. Any inconsistencies will be immediately detected by the organizational members, and they will choose other options to respond, decreasing followership investment in the change project.

Receivers on the other hand will likely iteratively respond as per their own motivations, payoffs, and chances of survival in the game (longevity of employment in the organization).

Self-Interest

• I am going to have to do something (present), so what did I do when this happened last time (past habitual aspects)?

• I will continue to do (present), what is needed, so I am not accused of doing nothing.

• If I do a bit more and be seen and heard on a couple of committees, I could be here for a long time, get promoted, and possibly even be the boss (future orientation).

Spite (an aspect of human nature that has also evolved over time – and forms an aspect of the evolutionary game theoretic approach)

• I must do something (present), or else coworker xyz will get the credit like last time (past habitual aspects).

• Maybe I can do something for the leader (present), so coworker zzz does not get any credit.

• This will allow the leader to be my ally and I can continue doing (future orientation) what I have always been doing.

Reciprocity and altruism

• The last time I contributed, I did so without expectation of any reward or recognition, but I did get both (past habitual aspects).

• Ready to roll up the sleeves, count me in (present).

• This is about time and will be great (future orientation) for the organization. Sign me up!

Cooperation

• This is great. I know several of us worked great together. I hope it is the same this time also (past habitual aspects).

• What teams and committees can I be a part of to move this along (present)?

• We can all have a great work environment, less bureaucracy, more collaboration, better productivity, and a fun place to work at (future orientation).

A primer on evolutionary game theory cautions that among higher-order organisms, players can tend to break up partnerships or vary the amount of cooperation. But if there are even a small number of retaliators (that prevent defection), then the players would favor cooperation (Sigmund & Nowak, 1999). The simplest example of such retaliators is the ‘tit-for-tat’-strategy, which causes a player to cooperate in the first round and after that repeats whatever the co-player did in the previous round. These players are now inexorably bound in this past habitual iteration, until there begins a move towards game strategies like generous tit-for-tat, win-stay-lose-shift, etc. But the game will be played with the payoffs in mind, wherein the higher the payoff for the player, the longer will be the retention of the strategy (if reciprocity is the strategy that will keep them playing longer). This reciprocity strategy could eventually lead to altruistic reciprocity, and cooperative behavior.

The study contends that these instances of reciprocation can be found in human societies, and often as indirect reciprocation. They state that such situations can give rise to competition between indiscriminate altruists and discriminate altruists (who only assist those that have not refused assistance too often), leading to an increased frequency of indiscriminate altruists at the expense of discriminate altruists, causing defectors to enter the population. However, by the method of how defectors operate, they will restore the balance and discriminate, and altruists will once again regain ground and even eliminate defectors (Sigmund & Nowak, 1999).

Our approach, it will be noted, places evolutionary psychology and game theory center-stage when it comes to understanding the kairos² or context of effective strategic communication. Kairos can point to indicators that reinforce certain human behaviors, such as staying with past strategies for continued payoffs, but moving the players (stakeholders) towards cooperative behaviors. If the default is self-interest with an eye on payoff and survival, the effective strategic communicator can use each of the strategies in their communication effort to move their organizational denizens towards continuous cooperative behavior. The leader will, however, need to be aware that if they themselves deviate from ethical and transparent communication and action, then they will create confusion in the ranks, spawn defectors, have the stakeholders revert to type (focus only on self-interest), and derail the journey towards the vision the leader has set out to achieve for the organization.

Conclusion

Clarity and consistency in organizationspeak, managerspeak, and leaderspeak signal to the receiver to contextualize the message (checking fit for the occasion), and then move towards unconditional reciprocity. Such a strategic effort by organizational leaders will find a fertile and receptive mindset among the organizational stakeholders. The efforts of the leader will result initially in conditional reciprocity/altruism, but with consistency, later, in unconditional altruistic behaviors. This mirrors in part the diffusion model, which places such empathetic leaderspeak at its center (Mayfield et al., 2015). Here, we additionally identify other things at a granular level ensuring more consistent reception for organizational strategic communication and leaderspeak, with the potential for increased followership investment. These other elements include an ethically grounded approach to communication, devoid of deceit, a focus on language that is inclusive, that motivates the receiver to a specific action, as well as overtly laying out the payoffs and benefits. The framework thus places leaderspeak at the core of organizational and individual strategic communication. It shows that niche construction by means of fundamental motives rests on strategic communication as a leadership function (Spisak et al., 2015).

The framework we have presented can be effectively used to parse leader language and strategic communication episodes by providing the basis of thematic code categories with which to analyze leaderspeak through the propositions we have put forward. Thematic code categories from speech act theory, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, motivational, and inclusive language can be identified in leader communication. Similarly, thematic code categories informed by evolutionary game theory, like self-interest, spite, altruism, reciprocity, and cooperative behavior can also be employed to conduct content analysis of leaderspeak and help discern from this language, what the payoffs and survival cues are for the intended audiences. Researchers can use this framework for studying and analyzing leader and organizational language. They can also use the results of the analysis to teach students and future leaders how to craft the language for effective and ethical strategic communication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Teachings of HHS Paramarthananda Saraswati.

² Specific to the occasion, Isocrates, 438–336 BCE