Negotiating meaning and co-constructing institutionalisable answers: Leadership through gate-keeping in performance appraisal interviews

•We study leadership discourse in performance appraisal interviews.•We explore the leadership activity of gate-keeping.•We identify and describe some discursive resources through which leadership is done.•Findings show that leadership is a collaborative activity rather than an attribute.

Although the topic of leadership is increasingly becoming an area of interest for discourse analysts, most of the studies on leadership discourse focus on business meetings and largely ignore other institutional contexts. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring leadership discourse in another important but often neglected genre, namely the performance appraisal interview.Drawing on naturally-occurring performance appraisal interviews recorded in a medical lab, we explore the particularly salient and (from a linguistic perspective) largely under-researched leadership activity of gate-keeping. This leadership activity is central to performance appraisal interviews and evolves around the conjoint negotiation of meaning and the co-construction of institutionalisable answers as they are ‘fixed’ by means of note taking.Through an in-depth analysis of how these leadership activities are performed in three performance appraisal interviews, this paper contributes to an understanding of the complex processes through which leadership is actually enacted on the micro-level of interactions in this increasingly relevant genre of institutional discourse.