Leadership capacity in teams

The present article examines the state of the field regarding leadership in teams. A perspective is advanced that considers leadership as an outcome of team processes (e.g., teamwork and team learning) that provides resources for better team adaptation and performance in subsequent performance cycles. This perspective complements but does not replace the perspective of leadership as an input to team processes and performance. Specific facets of the teaming cycle are reviewed, including the nature of teamwork and interventions designed to facilitate its development, the role of team learning as different from individual learning, and relatively recent advances in understanding shared and distributed leadership (DL). These components of team leadership are cast within an emerging IMOI (inputs, mediators, outcomes, inputs) framework proposed for understanding the cyclical and ongoing nature of teams in organizations.     

Emergence of shared leadership networks in teams: An adaptive process perspective

Adaptive leadership theory suggests that shared leadership networks grow in a complex manner. We propose that leadership decentralization (the dispersion of leadership), leadership density (the total amount of leadership), and situationally-aligned leadership (SAL: leadership transitions to those who fit situation requirements) are distinct aspects of a shared leadership network and should be examined together to capture the development of shared leadership process. Through a study of 450 participants in 90 teams, we find that each of these three aspects of shared leadership plays a different role during shared leadership network emergence. Specifically, transactive memory systems (TMS) contribute to decentralized leadership structures, which in turn precipitate more dense leadership networks. We also find that TMS contributes to the most situationally aligned team member engaging in leadership. Both leadership density and SAL predict team performance. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results.     

Predictors of the emergence of transformational leadership in virtual decision teams

This study examined the etiology of transformational leadership in virtual team contexts. First, we compared 127 members of virtual decision-making teams with 135 members of traditional face-to-face teams in terms of the relationship between aspects of personality and the emergence of transformational leadership. The type of communication media (face-to-face versus “pure” virtual) was found to interact with extraversion and emotional stability in the prediction of emerging transformational leadership. In line with prior findings, we showed how these personality characteristics were relevant to transformational leadership emergence in our face-to-face teams. However, they were largely unrelated to such leadership in the virtual team context. We also focused specifically on the virtual context by analyzing the content of team interactions. After accounting for the effect of degree of activity level, the linguistic quality in one's written communication was found to predict the emergence of transformational leadership in virtual teams.     

Top management team diversity and ambidexterity: The contingent role of shared responsibility and CEO cognitive trust

Earlier research has suggested that diversity is a double-edged sword when achieving organizational ambidexterity. While it may contribute to the development of new combinations of exploration and exploitation, it may also lead to disagreements and potential conflict within top management teams (TMTs). To improve our understanding of the effectiveness of diversity in ambidextrous organizations, we develop a synergistic perspective on TMT diversity and examine how two types of diversity – functional and age diversity – affect the achievement of organizational ambidexterity. We also identify shared responsibility and CEO cognitive trust as important contingencies that may complement the effects of diversity within TMTs in terms of resolving potential conflicts and managing tensions between exploration and exploitation effectively. Based on multisource data, our study shows that CEO cognitive trust and shared responsibility moderate the relationship between different types of diversity and ambidexterity. Our study has important implications for research on organizational ambidexterity, diversity, and senior leadership.     

Foreign language skill,anxiety, cultural intelligence and individual task performance in global virtual teams: A cognitive perspective

Global virtual teams (GVTs) operate in a globally dispersed work environment, principally relying on communication and information technologies to achieve work tasks. In this work context, using language effectively is crucial. We utilize the cognitive perspective to explain how foreign language use in a GVT influences individual task performance. This study employs (a) cognitive neuroscience of foreign language processing perspective to explain the relationship between foreign language skills and individual task performance; (b) the theory of cognitive load to explain foreign language anxiety as a pathway that further explains how low-level foreign language skill negatively influences individual task performance; and (c) the theory of intelligence to examine the conditional role of cultural intelligence in the mediation process. Utilizing 294 data pairs (collected from GVT members and their respective supervisors) in a multinational offshoring firm, we found support for the mediation process and the conditional influence of the dimensions of cultural intelligence in reducing the negative effect of foreign language anxiety on individual task performance in GVT.     

Transactive Goal Dynamics Theory: A relational goals perspective on work teams and leadership

Transactive Goal Dynamics (TGD) Theory is a multi-level, relational theory of goal pursuit that can be used to understand behavior within organizational teams. The theory describes the nature of goal-related interdependence (called transactive density) within dyads and groups, and predicts when transactive density will have positive versus negative consequences for goal-related outcomes. TGD Theory states that within many close dyads and teams, individuals’ goals, pursuits, and outcomes come to affect each other in a dense network of goal-related interdependence, with the individuals possessing and pursuing goals oriented toward themselves, other members of the system, and the system as a whole. This article discusses novel implications of the theory for the understanding of organizational teams and team leadership, and constraints on relational dynamics within organizational contexts.     

Different ways lead to ambidexterity: Configurations for team innovation across China,India, and Singapore

In this paper, we transfer the ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation to a cross-cultural context. We develop a configurational model to explore how combinations of opening leadership, closing leadership, and team initiative differently affect team innovation performance in different cultures. Applying an Asia-centric perspective, our study analyzes cross-cultural heterogeneity of team innovation processes across China, India, and Singapore. Our fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) illuminates cultural differences and the configurational nature of how leadership and team behaviors work together in promoting team innovation performance. We found that configurations for team innovation performance differ across countries, such that an innovation-yielding configuration in one country may be ineffective in another country. Moreover, our findings suggest that alternative, equifinal configurations of leadership and team initiative, rather than just one optimal pathway, are associated with high team innovation performance; and high-performance configurations and low-performance configurations are asymmetric and therefore imply non-linearity of the relationships. The findings provide implications for managers in different cultural contexts as they help identify culture-specific action repertoires to manage innovation processes and promote innovation performance.     

Leaders' cultural gap bridging behaviors and subordinates' work engagement in multinational teams

The effect of leadership on individuals in multinational teams remains underexplored. Based on self-concept theory, our study investigates how subordinates' work engagement is influenced by their perception of leader cultural gap bridging (CGB) behaviors that seek to facilitate intercultural collaboration in multinational teams. We draw on a quantitative, two-wave, individual-level study with 280 employees working in multinational teams. Our results reveal that subordinates' perception of leaders' CGB behaviors enhance their work engagement through its effect on their team identification. The positive indirect effect is contingent on the level of relationship conflict in the multinational teams.     

E-leadership: Re-examining transformations in leadership source and transmission

At the turn of the century, the first integrative review and conceptualization of the work on e-leadership was published in The Leadership Quarterly. During the late 1990's, with the rapid rise in advanced information technology (AIT) such as the Internet, e-mail, video conferencing, virtual teams, and groupware systems (GDSS), there were a number of authors beginning to examine how AIT would transform how organizations organize their work and the implications for leadership in those organizations. Much of this discussion fell under the broad label of “virtual” with authors at that time speculating how such technology might impact how leadership was practiced and investigated. Now, over a decade later, we re-examine how the theory, research, and practice domains have evolved with respect to the work on e-leadership and its implications for the way leadership functions. In this review, we have broadened the notion of what constitutes e-leadership, considering how AIT affects the leadership dynamic, how the leadership dynamic affects the faithful or unfaithful appropriation of AIT, how AIT can and is being used to develop leadership, and ultimately how each will shape how organizations function well into the future. In sum, we examine what we've learned about e-leadership, what needs to be learned, and what might constitute emerging topics that could drive the e-leadership agenda over the next decade and beyond.     

Leading across language barriers: Managing language-induced emotions in multinational teams

This study shows which negative emotion language barriers can provoke among multinational team (MNT) members and investigates how MNT leaders can successfully mitigate these detrimental effects. Multilingual teams constitute a leadership context of paramount importance in today's organizations, which prior research has neglected. Our study contributes to the literature on MNT leaders' emotion regulation strategies by investigating the specific challenges they face in this setting. We advance research on leadership in teams by exploring successful leadership strategies geared towards addressing language-induced emotions and by demonstrating the positive outcomes of MNT leaders leveraging their power in this context. Our study contributes to research on language barriers in multinational corporations by introducing the interplay of language-induced emotions and leadership to this area. Furthermore, it contributes to emotion-sensitive organizational studies by specifying previously established emotion management models for multilingual environments. On this basis, we draw conclusions for the development of future MNT leaders.     

An empirical study of transformational leadership,team performance and service quality in retail banks

The discipline of operations management (OM) has long been offering differing quantitative techniques for improving the efficiency of banking operations. However, there has been a trend in recent years that operations and services of the banking industry are becoming more diverse and unstructured, rendering many traditional OM quantitative techniques less effective in performance improvement. By integrating the literature on banking operations, service quality, leadership style and work teams, we argue that leadership style and team performance are crucial concerns determining the service quality performance of today's banking operations in a team setting. Using data collected from 192 employees from 32 operational teams (a leader and five members in each team) in 15 retail banks in Macau, China, we investigated whether the five dimensions of transformational leadership have an impact on team performance with respect to team cohesion, team leader job satisfaction and team competence; and whether the dimensions of team performance have an impact on such service quality dimensions as reliability and responsiveness. We found that one of the dimensions of transformational leadership and two of the dimensions of team performance have a significant impact on service quality. We discuss the implications of the findings for research and practise.     

Fostering integrated research on organizational politics and conflict in teams: A cross-phenomenal review

Modern business decisions are naturally prone to political influence and have become increasingly complex. Firms attempt to address this complexity by using decision-making teams, which not only involve the use of politics but also show conflict among members. We know only little about politics in decision-making teams. Paradoxically, the team level is particularly eminent in the related conflict literature. Hence, we incorporate the team level by relating the individual-, dyadic-, team-, and organizational-level politics literature with the team conflict literature to foster exchange between conceptually related yet empirically distant streams of research and to initiate more intensive politics research at the team level. In a thematic analysis of 166 publications, we identify 11 themes that represent ongoing discussions, debates, and trends within and between research in politics and conflict. We map out how research on multilevel politics and team-level conflict can enhance their mutual understanding and strengthen the meaningful team perspective in politics research in the future. Our main theoretical implications are advice for future scholarly research on theory choice within and between these streams of research, on the challenges of researching organizational politics and conflict as multilevel phenomena, and on conceptual boundaries between the positive effects of politics and conflict.     

Transformational leadership in context: Face-to-face and virtual teams

This experimental study examined transformational leadership in the context of traditional teams using face-to-face communication and virtual teams using computer-mediated communication. Thirty-nine leaders led both face-to-face and virtual teams. Repeated-measures analyses revealed similar mean levels of transformational leadership in both team types; however, leader rank order varied across team type. Post hoc analyses revealed that the most effective leaders where those who increased their transformational leadership in virtual teams. Furthermore, analyses at the team level revealed that the effect of transformational leadership on team performance was stronger in virtual than in face-to-face teams. Team-member ratings of transformational leadership were equally linked to project satisfaction in face-to-face and virtual teams. Considered as a whole, our results suggest that transformational leadership has a stronger effect in teams that use only computer-mediated communication, and that leaders who increase their transformational leadership behaviors in such teams achieve higher levels of team performance.     

Cultural and societal influences on shared leadership in globally dispersed teams

Leading globally dispersed teams poses critical challenges, especially if the team members are not only physically separated, but also culturally diverse and their tasks are dynamic and complex. It has been argued that shared leadership behaviors, such as continuous reflection, anticipation of a team's information needs, and initiating a team's social influence, positively influence virtual team performance. Country-level effects on shared leadership in globally dispersed teams, however, have been neglected. Building on the country institutional profile developed by Kostova (1997), we argue that regulative, cognitive, and normative components influence the likelihood that the individual will engage in shared leadership behaviors. Analyzing the differences between the institutional profiles of team members' home countries as reflected in institutional diversity as a team-level property, we furthermore point to different levels of institutional diversity as an enabling or hindering condition of shared leadership.     

Communication and trust are key: Unlocking the relationship between leadership and team performance and creativity

Considerable theoretical and empirical work has identified a relationship between transformational leadership and team performance and creativity. The mechanisms underlying this link, however, are not well understood. To identify the intervening processes inherent in this relationship, we experimentally manipulated the leadership style assigned to 44 teams taking part in a resource-maximization task. Teams were exposed either to a leader using inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, or a control condition. Our findings reveal important differences between leadership styles in communication and team outcomes (objective task performance and creativity). These results suggest that different dimensions of transformational leadership should be emphasized depending on the outcome sought. In addition, our results provide evidence for a sequential mediation model where leadership influences team outcomes through overall team communication and trust in teammates. This study suggests mechanisms by which transformational leaders may impact team outcomes, which has implications for team building and leadership training.     

HRD,the science of the artificial

Innovation is the bedrock of organizational and national competitiveness across the globe. Leaders of research and development (R&D) teams have an especially important role to play given their direct influence on leading, organizing, rallying, and managing the operations of innovative tasks. However, when it comes to how leaders influence R&D innovation in different contexts, researchers' opinions diverge. This study explores leadership characteristics and their contextual contingencies, using the approach of a multiple case study. This paper is situated in the stream of research focusing on the interactions of leadership and contextual factors in innovation. We collected qualitative data from four highly innovative teams residing in two national laboratories in the US. The results suggest that while leadership demonstrates similarities across the four teams – a simultaneous focus on the internal and external domains, it also displays different characteristics in teams that differ on three contextual factors: funding model, nature of tasks, and team structure. Theoretical and practical implications are drawn.     

The Effect of Team Leader Characteristics on Learning,Knowledge Application,and Performance of Cross‐Functional New Product Development Teams

This study examines how leadership characteristics in new product development teams affect the learning, knowledge application, and subsequently the performance of these teams. Using data from a study of 229 members from 52 high‐tech new product projects, we empirically demonstrate that team learning has a strong positive effect on the innovativeness and speed to market of the new products. Moreover, a democratic leadership style, initiation of goal structure by the team leader, and his or her position within the organization were positively related to team learning. Managerial implications of these results are discussed.     

3D Collaborative Virtual Environments: Exploring the Link between Collaborative Behaviors and Team Performance

Increasingly, organizational work is conducted by virtual teams interacting across boundaries of space and time. Despite advances in collaborative technologies, members of virtual teams often find the experience challenging and a far cry from physically “being there.” In response, immersive and interactive three‐dimensional collaborative virtual environments (3D CVEs) are emerging and purported to address the shortcoming of earlier technologies. How teams will interact and ultimately perform in a 3D environment remains to be seen. In this study, drawing from group and communication theories, we explore the link between collaborative behaviors and the performance of virtual teams working in a 3D CVE. We report on the results of a controlled experiment consisting of 39 virtual teams of 91 individuals. Through cluster analysis, we identify distinct patterns of collaborative behaviors associated with differential levels of performance. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of how the unique spatial and visual characteristics of 3D CVEs may transform virtual work.     

How transformational leadership works during team interactions: A behavioral process analysis

Transformational leadership is generally considered helpful for team functioning. However, the social dynamics underlying the benefits of transformational leadership remain elusive to date. To understand how and why transformational leadership can foster team functioning, this study focuses on leader–follower communication dynamics during team interactions. From the perspective of leadership as social problem solving, we argue that transformational leadership is linked to functional team problem-solving processes because transformational leaders use solution-focused communication (mediator model). In a sample of 30 videotaped problem-solving team meetings from two organizations, we coded transformational leadership style and the verbal behavioral interactions of leaders and team members over the course of their entire meetings (30,128 behavioral units in total). Multilevel results showed that transformational leadership was positively linked to functional problem-solving communication by team members. This positive relationship was mediated by leaders' solution-focused communication. Moreover, at the micro-level of conversational dynamics within the meeting process, lag sequential analysis revealed that leaders' ideas and solutions triggered subsequent solution statements by team members and inhibited counterproductive communication by team members, such as running off topic, criticizing, or complaining. We discuss theoretical and methodological implications for conceptualizing dynamic leader–follower processes as well as managerial implications for leading effective meetings in organizations.