Leadership and Semiautonomous Work Team Performance

This study used measures of team performance, organizational support, and supervisors' judgment to examine the consistency of ratings of teams by both their members as well as their supervisors. For 75 team members from 13 different work teams in different organizations Pearson correlation coefficients were used to assess the consistency of ratings of these measures within the teams and between teams and supervisors. The results indicate the need for rater training, both at the team and supervisor levels.

I adopt a leadership as a networks approach to propose ethical leadership can emerge and be shared among team members. Therefore, I introduce the construct of shared ethical leadership and I begin to build the construct's nomological network by first examining ethical leadership training and shared leadership training as factors which, when additively combined, promote the density of shared ethical leadership in teams. Further, I examine these antecedents by predicting their effects will be optimized when power differentials between team members and their nominal leader are minimized. Moving to the consequences of shared ethical leadership, I propose a four-path model of social learning and social-exchange effects on proximal and distal team outcomes. First, I suggest that shared ethical leadership promotes the emergence of the team moral potency needed to make ethical choices when confronted with opportunities to ethically transgress. I then predict that the team's moral potency mediates the positive relationship between shared ethical leadership and team ethical behavior. Additionally, I argue that shared ethical leadership promotes goal concessions among team members and those goal concessions mediate the positive relationship between shared ethical leadership and team performance. I then suggest that shared ethical leadership promotes team information elaboration, which in turn mediates positive relationships with the team's ethical behavior and performance. I examine the hypotheses in a 2x2x2, between-subjects experiment using a simulated team activity with a sample of 56, 5-person teams (n=280). While the findings indicate a lack of support for most of my hypothesized relationships, the density of team's shared ethical leadership network was found to be positively related to team ethical behaviors. In addition, team information elaboration was positively related to team performance. Based on my findings, the theoretical and practical implications of this research are discussed.

The aim of the study that is described in this article was to determine the relationship between team leaders' motivational behavior and the performance of their team members. Moreover, the differences between the team leaders' self-assessments of their motivational behavior and their team members' perceptions have been studied. The study has been performed among 27 team leaders and the team members they are supervising in a South African multinational that produces tank containers. In the study each team is represented by 5 members, so the total sample consists of 135 team members. It appears that we have succeeded in developing a reliable measurement instrument for measuring degrees of motivational behavior shown by team leaders. Both for the team leaders' self-ratings and for the team members' ratings, the scales appear to be homogeneous. The instrument may be useful as a means for finding out where motivational behavior is already shown in organizations and where it has to be improved. It can also be used as a research instrument in future studies of the phenomenon. Moreover, the relationship between the team leaders' motivational behavior and the performance of the team members are dealt with. Besides, differences between the self-ratings and team members' ratings are discussed. Finally, some major implications of the outcomes and recommendations are given.

Purpose This research aims to examine how team leaders’ servant leadership influences team members’ perceptions of a compassionate climate and, in turn, how these perceptions foster perceived shared vision. Specifically, leader grit and team size are proposed as moderators of the relationship between servant leadership and perceived compassionate climate. Design/methodology/approach Survey data were collected from 304 matched leader–member dyads across 116 teams in one of Thailand’s largest canned seafood manufacturing firms. Multisource data were obtained from team members and their team leaders within each team to minimize the potential risk of common method variance. The research model was analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Findings The results indicate that servant leadership did not have a significant direct effect on perceived shared vision; rather, its relationship with perceived shared vision operated indirectly through perceived compassionate climate. The findings further show that the positive association between servant leadership and perceived compassionate climate is stronger when team leaders exhibit higher levels of grit and when team size is relatively large. In contrast, the association becomes weaker and statistically non-significant when leader grit is low or when team size is small. Practical implications The findings suggest that organizations can enhance employee productivity by fostering a supportive working environment through servant leadership. Encouraging leaders to consistently demonstrate empathy and persistence can strengthen a compassionate climate, thereby improving alignment and cooperation in employment settings. Originality/value This study contributes to the servant leadership literature by identifying important boundary conditions and clarifying the perceptual mechanism through which servant leadership relates to shared vision. The findings suggest that the influence of servant leadership on employees’ perceptions of their team environment varies depending on leader persistence and team structure, thereby offering a more nuanced understanding of its contextual effectiveness.

Through the examination of 11 intact interuniversity research project teams, this study examines the relationship between team leaders, team members, their communication networks (represented as structural holes), and performance. The study shows that in the conduct of their work, the team leaders bridged more structural holes than team members. Although team leaders demonstrated a higher level of out-of-alliance performance, they did not demonstrate higher levels of individual performance on their teams (compared with team members). Furthermore, we examined the relationship between structural holes and both individual team member performance and overall team performance. Contrary to our expectations, bridging structural holes were not significantly related to individual team member performance but were negatively and significantly related to overall team performance, the effect of which came mainly from team members’ effective size.

This study explores the relationships among transformational leadership style, cognitive trust, and collective efficacy as well as the impact of these variables on distal team performance. Data collected from 39 teams find that team cognitive trust as two process variables involves a transformational leadership process in which cognitive trust in the team leader and cognitive trust among team members mediate the impact of this leadership style on collective efficacy. Unlike previous studies, our results show that leveraging cognitive trust in the team leader is necessary but not sufficient for better proximal collective efficacy, which in turn facilitates distal team performance. Although cognitive trust among team members was more closely related to proximal collective efficacy than cognitive trust in the team leader was, the factors that foster the development of cognitive trust among team members remain scantly explored in the transformational leadership literature and deserve more attention in future research.

Assessing team performance is a difficult task for instructors because of factors such as high workload. Automated performance measurement systems may provide assistance to instructors and improve the quality of performance assessment. However, little research is available to guide such interventions or to document their effects. This research compared the ability of flight instructors to give diagnostic ratings of team performance with or without computer assistance using the Enhancing Performance With Improved Coordination (EPIC) tool. It was found that the instructor group operating with EPIC (n = 10) had more differentiated and accurate ratings of team performance compared to the control group (n = 10). These results suggest that approaches such as EPIC can serve to complement and augment instructor capabilities, providing more powerful and diagnostic team performance assessment systems.

Researchers have identified team learning as an important predictor of team performance. In healthcare organizations, it is especially critical for care quality and hospital performance that teams engage in learning behaviors to reduce errors and improve service effectiveness. The main objective of this study is to examine the role of change-oriented leadership in the learning process and outcomes of healthcare teams. The sample comprises a total of 698 healthcare professionals working in 107 teams at different public hospitals throughout Spain. Members of teams were invited to participate voluntarily by completing an anonymous individual questionnaire. The results show a mediating effect of team learning on the relationship between change-oriented leadership and team performance and psychological safety and team performance. Our study contributes to the literature by investigating the role of change-oriented leadership in facilitating team learning behaviors. Moreover, this study advances our understanding of the mediators of the relationship between team leadership and outcomes by testing to assess whether specific change-oriented leader behaviors nurture psychological safety, team learning and, therefore, performance.

The social network perspective provides a valuable lens to understand the effectiveness of team leaders. In understanding leadership impact in team networks, an important question concerns the structural influence of leader centrality in advice-giving networks on team performance. Taking the inconsistent evidence for the positive relationship of network centrality and leadership effectiveness as a starting point, we suggest that the positive impact of leader centrality in advice-giving networks is contingent on team needs for leadership to meet communication and coordination challenges, which we argue are larger in larger teams. Developing our analysis, we examine the mediating role of member collaboration in the relationship of leader network centrality and team performance as moderated by team size. Based on a multi-source dataset of 542 employees and 71 team leaders, we found that leader centrality in advice-giving networks related positively to team performance in larger teams but negatively in smaller teams. Results supported the mediated moderation model via member collaboration in smaller teams, but not in larger teams.

Purpose– The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate impact of transformational leadership on team performance and the effects of support for innovation and psychological empowerment in this association. Over the past many decades, teams have become an increasingly popular way of organizing and coordinating work. This trend creates new challenges for leaders, as they are expected to motivate individual employees and to improve team performance simultaneously.Design/methodology/approach– This study proposes a conceptual framework for understanding motivation and support extended to individual employees which would influence team performance. The conceptual framework includes psychological empowerment and support for innovation as mediating variables in the effect of transformational leadership on team performance. The study also validates the proposed conceptual framework using a second-order confirmatory factor analysis technique, namely, partial least squares-structural equations modeling, with the data collected from 182 followers from 10 service organizations in the UAE.Findings– The findings suggest that transformational leadership has significant positive impact on team performance and, on the contrary, transactional leadership has significant negative effect on team performance. Two dimensions of psychological empowerment such as meaning and self-determination have partial mediation effect in the relationship between transformational leadership and team performance.Originality/value– This study contributes to the research that identifies team mechanisms influenced by transformational leadership that can affect team success and performance, particularly in the context of UAE-based organizations. Managerial implications and future research areas are further discussed.

Factors that affect work team performance are the subject of numerous studies that contribute to the understanding of how teams can operate effectively in a constantly changing environment. The focus of this paper is on the relationship between work team diversity and team performance. The aim is to evaluate the impact of various work team diversity categories and characteristics on team performance. The research is executed on the sample of more than 940 sales work teams within international corporation with the global presence. Performance of sales work teams is measured by achieved revenue on country level and consequently consolidated in a form of global performance ranking. Linear regression is used to analyse the impact of work team diversity characteristics on team performance. The results confirm that team performance is influenced by gender, nationality, and mother language diversity of team members, but also by seniority and stability of work team. Team size and job specialization seem to be without any significant impact on team performance.

We consider the utility of two contrasting theoretical perspectives in explaining how laissez‐faire formal leaders and team member motivation to lead (MTL) influences informal leadership and team task performance. The first perspective, functional leadership theory, is the dominant lens used currently to understand informal leadership. However, we suggest that social learning theory offers a compelling alternative account. In a multiwave survey study of 344 members of 72 work teams, we find support for the social learning theory predictions that laissez‐faire formal leaders are perceived by team members to engage in less modeling of effective leadership and as a result are negatively associated with informal leadership and team task performance. We do not find support for the functional leadership theory predictions that laissez‐faire formal leaders are positively associated with team members’ informal leadership and team task performance, which would be due to an increased perceived need for leadership. The social learning effects are stronger for teams that are lower in member MTL and weaker for teams that are higher in member MTL. These results suggest social learning theory may be preferable to functional leadership theory for understanding informal leadership in teams.

A Team of Leaders: Empowering Every Member to Take Ownership, Demonstrate Initiative, and Deliver Results Paul Gustavson and Steward LiffAMACOM (2014) 226 pages, hardcover, $26.95Do you manage teams or belong to a team? The vast majority of us will respond yes to this question. As a college professor, I often have students work in teams for the entire semester to complete assignments and projects. Interestingly, it is one of the activities they most dislike, second only to public speaking. Yet, when they enter the workforce these skills may be the most important ones they possess. In general, universities recognize that courses to improve communication skills need to be in the curriculum, but those that include team building and performance primarily cover theory. Perhaps we need a course in which team building activities are instructed, practiced, evaluated, and improved.In the meantime, organizations must conduct the training for these skills in-house or seek expert advice because we understand that team skills are central to organizational success in the 21st century. This understanding is the reason A Team of Leaders: Empowering Every Member to Take Ownership, Demonstrate Initiative, and Deliver Results by Gustavson and Liffis so important. Gustavson and Liffhave spent decades developing the expertise that they share with us in this book. As a manager or member of a team, this book is a rich and valuable resource, and one that I expect will be referred to frequently as your organization evolves through this transformation.Gustavson and Liffprovide us with six chapters of information including tools, models, actions, and expected outcomes for developing a team of leaders. In their experience, the authors find that the highest performing teams are those that include self-sufficient and more engaged members. In addition, they believe that most problems within teams are caused by the design of the team as well as management systems and processes. They are not assigning blame, but providing insight to what improvements are possible in order to achieve the organizational outcomes we desire.It follows, therefore, that a basic premise of the book is that creating a team of leaders requires altering the roles of the team's leader and members as well as a redesign of the organization's systems and processes. A five stage model to develop this team of leaders is the subject of the book with the ultimate goal that everyone on the team steps up and provides leadership. This allows the formal team leader to become an advisor while members of the team rotate through the lead role, provide shared leadership, and are involved and committed.At the beginning of each chapter, the authors include a Key Principle that provides insight into the chapter contents and anticipated outcome. Guidelines, frameworks/models, tool kits, and examples support the material and offer the reader a series of questions to ask in order to appropriately apply the information within their organization. At the end of each chapter two additional resources assist in understanding this process: (a) challenges, tensions, and key facts during implementation; and (b) how the chapter topic will help build leaders. The first resource recognizes that change is difficult and that this process will be different in each organization; the second reinforces the key concept of the chapter and its strategic role in the process toward developing a team of leaders.In chapter one, each of the five stages in developing a team of leaders is summarized in a chart and detailed in the reading. This chapter serves as the foundation for the rest of the book. Gustavson and Liffhighlight that communication is key to the process. …

Large corporations increasingly use multinational teams to integrate their global operations. To perform this complex task efficiently, team members need to develop shared mental models (SMMs), i.e. an organized understanding of the knowledge base they are sharing. In multinational teams, the heterogeneity of team members makes SMM formation especially challenging. While previous research has investigated the influence of different diversity factors on SMMs, the impact of language differences has surprisingly been neglected so far. To address this important gap we investigate how different elements of the language barrier impede the formation of different types of SMMs. Based on 84 semi-structured interviews with team leaders, members and senior managers of 15 multinational teams in three German automotive corporations we develop a model showing how pragmatic and paraverbal barriers between team members obstruct SMMs about roles, responsibilities and interaction patterns and how shortcomings in lexical, syntactical and phonetic proficiency impede SMMs about team members' preferences, strengths, weaknesses as well as values and attitudes. These findings integrate linguistic and psychological theories with management studies and complement our understanding of the antecedents of SMMs in multinational teams. This is of crucial importance since SMMs have been established as important prerequisites for team performance.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a research model that explains team performance based on social cognitive theory and social exchange theory. In the model, team performance indirectly relates to three kinds of leadership (i.e., charismatic, autocratic and considerate) via the full mediation of collective efficacy. At the same time, team justice as a focus in this study is examined as a moderator in the model.Design/methodology/approachThe research hypotheses of this study were empirically tested using two-wave data collection across insurance sales teams from a leading bank holding company which is the largest bank holding company in Taiwan. In the first-wave data collection, researchers of this study surveyed six people anonymously from each sales team, including a team leader and five team members. Three months later, the researchers conducted the second-wave data collection by obtaining team performance data from the department of human resource management, which was an independent rater for each team’s performance. Two-wave data collection from 59 teams was achieved for verifying the hypothesized effects.FindingsThe team-level test results show that collective efficacy fully mediates the relationship between charismatic leadership and team performance and between considerate leadership and team performance. Justice moderates the relationship between collective efficacy and team performance and between charismatic leadership and collective efficacy.Originality/valueThis study has two major theoretical implications. First, this study conceptualized three distinct kinds of leadership as major determinants of team performance from a social exchange perspective. Such a theoretical conceptualization of leadership not only broadens the boundary of leadership beyond traditional one such as transactional leadership based on the theory of contingent reward but also closely reflects the practical status quo of leadership of teams. Second, this research incorporated social exchange theory into the framework of team performance in social cognitive theory. Specifically, this study theorized and validated justice as a moderator in the development of team performance.