Migrant Physicians’ Leadership Styles in Managing Challenging Professional Situations
摘要
Migrant physicians’ leadership styles play a vital role when managing the challenges of adjusting to a new workplace culture. In this light, leadership discourses often take central stage when physicians narrate decision-making processes of problematic workplace situations. This chapter explores leadership discourses in interview data collected from over 40 migrant physicians across Chile between 2016 and 2020. Interestingly, though most migrant physicians come from Latin-American countries (thus, speak Spanish), they very often reflected on their relationship with patients and contrasted their practices to those of local physicians. In their accounts, migrant physicians’ leadership skills surfaced as part of a sense-making process to face problematic workplace situations. Drawing on discursive leadership and positioning theory, and using an integrative discourse analytical framework, we present a taxonomy of leadership discourses of migrant physicians in Chile for frontstage (physician-patient) and backstage (physician-physician) situations. We discuss the ways in which these discourses display complex self-positionings and underpin migrant physicians’ professional beliefs and values, medical ideologies, and understandings of their role as care providers. The study contributes to advancing our understanding of leadership in the professions in intercultural monolingual contexts from a sociolinguistic perspective and suggests possible applications to language teaching for special purposes.