LAUSR

Welcome to our second special issue on leadership communication. Editing these issues gave us the chance to engage with many well-established and emerging experts in leadership communication. The collaboration also gave us a chance to look back at what has been accomplished in leadership communication over the past 50 years, survey the current state of leadership communication, and even catch a glimpse of where we might go. We now have a much keener respect for the giants whose shoulders we stand on—those people who have previously mapped out the ever-advancing terrain of leadership communication (Breton, 1997; Clutterbuck & Hirst, 2002; Greenbaum, 1972; Hackman & Johnson, 2013; Knapp, 1969). We presented a leadership communication model in our introduction to the first special issue on leadership communication, and we continue to apply the framework here (see Figure 1 for a graphical presentation of the model and brief narrative overview of its properties). We use the model to describe each article in this issue and help us better understand leadership communication’s boundaries. We also look at what these articles tell us about where leadership communication is going and where it needs to go in addition to using the model. Opening this issue is “Communicating Leader-Member Relationship Quality: The Development of Leader Communication Exchange Scales to Measure Relationship Building and Maintenance Through the Exchange of Communication-Based Goods” by Omilion-Hodges and Baker. Their study takes a fresh perspective on a well-established leader-member exchange theory (Gerstner & Day, 1997; Graen & Cashman, 1975), and explicitly investigates the theory’s communication foundation. And their study enriches our understanding of the entire LMX process through this focus. Communication has always been integral to LMX, yet few studies have explicitly examined it theoretical and