Team Effectiveness In Complex Organizations

Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives and Approaches

Eduardo Salas, Gerald F. Goodwin, C. Shawn Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135596552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Over the past 40 years, there has been a growing trend toward the utilization of teams for accomplishing work in organizations. Project teams, self-managed work teams and top management teams, among others have become a regular element in the corporation or military. This volume is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the art research on team effectiveness.

Section II
Cross-Disciplinary Theoretical Approaches

4
Team Leadership and Team Effectiveness^*

Stephen J. Zaccaro, Beth Heinen, and Marissa Shuffle

Team leadership is essential for team effectiveness. The contribution of leadership to effective team performance rests on the extent to which team leaders help members achieve a synergistic threshold, where collective effort accomplishes more than the sum of individual abilities or efforts. Collins and Guetzkow (1964) defned such a threshold in decision-making groups as refecting an “assembly bonus,” where decisions emerging from group interaction are superior in quality to those made by the group’s most capable member (see also Michaelson, Watson, & Black, 1989). Groups and teams rarely achieve a synergistic threshold, or the assembly bonus (Hill, 1982), primarily because of process loss (Steiner, 1972). Process losses can be attributed to the failure of team members to develop the best means of combining their individual capabilities in a concerted direction or to the unwillingness or inability of members to exert suffcient levels of individual effort (ibid.). The activities of effective team leadership, therefore, need to center on providing the direction for collective action and on helping teams reach and maintain a state of minimal process loss (cf. Gardner & Schermerhorn, 1992; Jacobs & Jaques, 1990).

Despite the importance of leadership for team effectiveness, literatures on leadership and team dynamics have not offered an abundance of conceptual frames to explain how leadership contributes to team effectiveness. For example, Hackman and Walton (1986) noted, “we have not found among existing leadership theories, one that deals to our satisfaction with the leadership of task performing groups in organizations” (p. 73, italics in original). Fifteen years later, even with some important contributions in the interim (e.g., Beyerlein, Johnson, & Beyerlein, 1996; Kozlowski, Gully, McHugh, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 1996; Kozlowski, Gully, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 1996), Zaccaro, Rittman, and Marks (2001, p. 452) noted, “We know surprisingly little about how leaders create and manage effective teams.” Salas, Burke, and Stagl (2004, p. 342) stated similarly, “One area that has been relatively neglected in the team literature is the role of the team leader.”

This relative lack of conceptual frames and models in the face of huge separate literatures on leadership and team dynamics, respectively, has resulted primarily from the tendency of traditional leadership theories not to make the distinction between leader–subordinate interactions and leader–team interactions (Burke et al., 2006; Salas et al., 2004). Leadership models such as path goal theory (House, 1971; House & Dessler, 1974), leader member exchange theory (Dansereau, Graen, & Haga, 1975), and inspirational leadership theories (Bass, 1985; Bass & Avolio, 1993; Conger & Kanungo, 1987; House, 1977) provide excellent treatments of how leadership behaviors infuence subordinate attitudes, beliefs, motives, effort, and performance. Other frameworks, such as contingency theory (Fiedler, 1964, 1971), normative decision models (Vroom & Yetton, 1973), and leader substitutes theory (Kerr & Jermier, 1978) describe how group properties and variables moderate the display or effectiveness of particularly leadership activities. Though these approaches make substantial contributions to the understanding of organizational leadership, they do not defne precisely how leadership contributes to team effectiveness (see House’s [1996] revision of path goal theory as an exception). Such defnitions need to focus not on dyadic or individual consequences of leadership activities but rather on how team leaders and team leadership processes foster more interconnectivity, integration, and coherence among team members. Accordingly, the prime unit of analysis for criteria in studies of team leadership should reside at the team or group level, not at the individual level. Predictor units of analysis can be at both the individual (e.g., leader) and team level.

Perhaps in response to the relative paucity of truly team-based leadership research, the recent literature in this domain has experienced a signifcant surge in conceptual frameworks, models, and empirical studies (e.g., Basadur, 2004; Burke et al., 2006; Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2004, 2006; Ellemers, De Gilder, & Haslam, 2004; Hackman & Wageman, 2005; Marta, Leritz, & Mumford, 2005; Morgeson, 2005; Peterson, Smith, Martorana, & Owens, 2003; Zaccaro & Klimoski, 2002). The present chapter reviews and integrates this body of theoretical and empirical research to develop a somewhat comprehensive model describing how leaders and team leadership processes contribute to team effectiveness or to the minimization of process loss and the achievement of the team synergy.

Leader-Centric versus Team-Centric Leadership

At this point we need to highlight a distinction in the extant literature between two perspectives on leadership and team dynamics. One perspective emphasizes the importance of individuals who occupy the leader role in the team and who have primary responsibility for shaping the conditions of team effectiveness. Thus, researchers have labeled such leader-centered approaches as “traditional” (Day et al., 2004), “heroic” (Manz & Sims, 1991; Yukl, 2006), “vertical” (Conger & Pearce, 2003; Pearce & Sims, 2002), “top-down” (Locke, 2003), and “hierarchical” (Jaques, 1990). Researchers in this perspective generally direct their focus of inquiry on the attributes of individual leaders and the processes they use to infuence team dynamics. Thus, leaders and leadership processes are defned within Input–Process–Output (IPO) models of team dynamics (Hackman & Morris, 1975; McGrath, 1964) as key inputs to team processes (Day et al., 2004). Followers are treated as mostly passive recipients of the leader’s infuence, or their primary role is to grant legitimacy to the leader’s exercise of power and infuence (Hollander & Julian, 1970). Leadership development interventions within such perspectives target growth in individual leadership skills (Day, 2000).

A more recent perspective emphasizes principles of collective leadership, where the responsibility for directing and managing collective efforts becomes shared among team members (Manz & Sims, 1980). This perspective, referred to as involving “shared leadership” (Pearce & Conger, 2003b), “self-managed teams” (Manz & Sims, 1987), or “distributed leadership” (Day et al., 2004) has roots in early writings on situational leadership (e.g., Gibb, 1954), in models of followership and leader emergence (Hollander & Julian, 1970), in leadership substitutes models (Kerr & Jermier, 1978), and in theories of transformational leadership that center on the empowerment of subordinates (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978). Self-managing teams are typically defned as not having a formal or appointed leader (Day et al., 2004). One individual may often emerge as a leader by virtue of his or her performance within the team and subsequently adopts the responsibilities of a formal leader role incumbent, or across tasks the leadership responsibilities may rotate to different individuals who possess the skills and expertise to lead in particular situations (Gibb, 1947, 1954). Both processes reflct either emergent or distributed leadership, but, at the task level, leadership infuence still remains within an individual. Another version of this perspective defnes leadership not as an input to team process but rather as a quality that “emerges or is drawn from teams as a function of working on and accomplishing shared work” (Day et al., 2004, p. 859). Here, leadership is truly shared within a single task or project, with different members contributing leadership infuence (Pearce & Conger, 2003a). Leadership development interventions within this perspective take a more systems approach, focusing on the team or organization in addition to individuals (Day & Zaccaro, 2004; Day et al., 2004).

Perhaps because of the ubiquity of leader-entered perspectives in the literature, models of team-centered leadership tend to be framed in “oppositional” terms relative to leader-centered models (Conger & Pearce, 2003; Day et al., 2004; Locke, 2003; Pearce & Sims, 2002). Dumaine (1990, p. 52), for example, questioned, “Who needs a boss?” However, several theorists have acknowledged, or argued, that both leader-centered and team-centered processes contribute to team effectiveness (Conger & Pearce, 2003; Cox, Pearce, & Perry, 2003; Druskat & Wheeler, 2003; Pearce, 2004). Indeed, regarding one type of organizational team that often utilizes self-management procedures, Cox et al. (2003, p. 58) noted:

Shared leadership supplements but does not replace vertical leadership in new product development teams (e.g., Pearce & Sims, 2000, 2002). Indeed, the vertical leader, often the formally designated project or program manager, retains a range of important responsibilities even in shared leadership contexts. These responsibilities include forming the team, managing boundaries, providing as-needed leadership support, and maintaining the shared leadership system in the team. We position vertical leadership as an antecedent variable that may affect the extent to which shared leadership emerges in an NPD [new product development] team.

Roles of Leaders in Shared Leadership Systems

The role of individual leaders in team-centered leadership systems can be conceptualized in three ways: as internal leaders, external leaders, or executive coordinators. Many organizational teams may have formal internal leaders even when, in some or all instances, leadership functions are distributed among team members. These internal team leaders serve as active and frequent participants in team interactions. However, they have the responsibility for deciding when and how much team members participate in leadership infuence. Several situational leadership models describe how team factors such as member maturity and expertise (Hersey & Blanchard, 1988) and cohesion (Kerr & Jermier, 1978) foster more participative leadership. Vroom and Yetton’s (1973) leader decision model described such variables as the distribution of unique information within the team, the likelihood of decision acceptance or cooperation by team members, and the importance and structure of the team problem that determine when participative leadership will be more fruitful than directive leadership.

The functions of an internal team leader include designing and developing the team so that members can subsequently practice effective selfmanagement (Pearce, 2004). These functions include staffng the team with members who have suffcient levels and diversity of requisite task, teamwork, and leadership skills; specifying a clear purpose and direction for the team’s collective action; specifying expectations for team interaction; and coaching team members in their individual and collective practice of shared team leadership (Pearce, 2004; Wageman, 2001). Internal leaders also have some responsibility for managing the team’s boundaries and its relationships with external constituencies. Boundary management inc...