Prior to beginning work on this discussion, read Chapter 16 of the Northouse course text, which looks at team leadership. Also, read Chapter 2 of the Oedekoven et

Chapter 16 Leadership & Teamwork

"Work teams are very prevalent in today’s organizations. The reliance on teams is due partially to increasingly complex tasks, more globalization, and the flattening of organizational structures. A team is a type of organizational group that is composed of members who are interdependent, who share common goals, and who must coordinate their activities to accomplish these goals. Team members must work collectively to achieve their goals. Examples of organizational teams include senior executive teams, project management teams, task forces, work units, standing committees, quality teams, and improvement teams. Teams can be located in the same place meeting face-to-face, or they can be geographically dispersed “virtual” teams meeting across time and distance via various forms of communication technology. Teams can also be hybrids of face-to-face and virtual teams with some members being co-located and some being dispersed. Exactly what defines an organizational group as a team or not is constantly evolving as organizations confront the many new forms of contemporary collaboration (Wageman, Gardner, & Mortensen, 2012).

The study of organizational teams has focused on strategies for maintaining a competitive advantage. Team-based organizations have faster response capability because of their flatter organizational structures, which rely on teams and new technology to enable communication across time and space (Porter & Beyerlein, 2000). These newer organizational structures have been referred to as “team-based and technology-enabled” (Mankin, Cohen, & Bikson, 1996).

Before the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally and people were forced to work remotely from their homes, relying on videoconferencing for meetings and engagement, a majority of multinational companies were already depending on virtual teams, or teams that are geographically dispersed and rely on technology to interact and collaborate (Muethel, Gehrlein, & Hoegl, 2012). Such teams allow companies to (1) use the best talent across the globe, (2) facilitate collaboration across time and space, and (3) reduce travel costs (Paul, Drake, & Liang, 2016) and, as experienced during the pandemic, allow organizational work to continue when physical locations are shut down or unavailable. The development of social media, video communication technologies, and software applications for meeting management has given virtual teams richer and more realistic communication environments where collaboration is facilitated (Schmidt, 2014; Schouten, van den Hooff, & Feldberg, 2016; Scott, 2013). Despite this, virtual teams face more difficulty with members separated by time, distance, and culture. In virtual teams, face-to-face communication is rare, with decisions and scheduling taking more time. In addition, they often have less trust, more conflict, and more subgroup formation. Breuer, Hüffmeier, and Hertel (2016) found that trust is an important factor when leading virtual teams because trust has been shown to be more important to virtual teams compared to face-to-face teams.

The Center for Creative Leadership worked with 141 virtual teams around the world and found that three key factors influence the effectiveness of virtual teams (Leslie & Hoole, 2018):

Technology. Effective team leadership uses technology to create connections among team members and make team members feel like they are working face-to-face. The use of videoconferencing (e.g., Zoom) became critical during the COVID-19 pandemic to allow for team success.Managing distance. In many cases, virtual teams work across different time zones, and accommodating differing schedules is important. Virtual team leadership must share the burden of early-morning and late-night meetings among team members so that certain members are not always the ones to accommodate the time zone differences. Physical distance is a challenge to the engagement of team members, and team leaders must work to ensure members’ commitment to team goals.Team structure. Virtual team leadership must carefully consider the members of the team and ensure that those on the team are committed. While this is true for all teams, it is even more critical in a virtual team, since it is easier for team members to “check out.” Often, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, some people were members of many different virtual teams, which resulted in less effort toward any one team and harmed the overall effectiveness.

Whether traditional or virtual, the organizational team-based structure is an important way for organizations to remain competitive by responding quickly and adapting to constant, rapid changes. Studies of both face-to-face and virtual teams have increasingly become focused on team processes and team outcomes (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Thomas, Martin, & Riggio, 2013). Also, researchers focused on the problems work teams confront as well as how to make these work teams more effective (Ilgen, Major, Hollenbeck, & Sego, 1993). Effective organizational teams lead to many desirable outcomes, such as

greater productivity,more effective use of resources,better decisions and problem solving,better-quality products and services, andgreater innovation and creativity (Parker, 1990)."

"Work teams are very prevalent in today’s organizations. The reliance on teams is due partially to increasingly complex tasks, more globalization, and the flattening of organizational structures. A team is a type of organizational group that is composed of members who are interdependent, who share common goals, and who must coordinate their activities to accomplish these goals. Team members must work collectively to achieve their goals. Examples of organizational teams include senior executive teams, project management teams, task forces, work units, standing committees, quality teams, and improvement teams. Teams can be located in the same place meeting face-to-face, or they can be geographically dispersed “virtual” teams meeting across time and distance via various forms of communication technology. Teams can also be hybrids of face-to-face and virtual teams with some members being co-located and some being dispersed. Exactly what defines an organizational group as a team or not is constantly evolving as organizations confront the many new forms of contemporary collaboration (Wageman, Gardner, & Mortensen, 2012).

The study of organizational teams has focused on strategies for maintaining a competitive advantage. Team-based organizations have faster response capability because of their flatter organizational structures, which rely on teams and new technology to enable communication across time and space (Porter & Beyerlein, 2000). These newer organizational structures have been referred to as “team-based and technology-enabled” (Mankin, Cohen, & Bikson, 1996).

Before the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally and people were forced to work remotely from their homes, relying on videoconferencing for meetings and engagement, a majority of multinational companies were already depending on virtual teams, or teams that are geographically dispersed and rely on technology to interact and collaborate (Muethel, Gehrlein, & Hoegl, 2012). Such teams allow companies to (1) use the best talent across the globe, (2) facilitate collaboration across time and space, and (3) reduce travel costs (Paul, Drake, & Liang, 2016) and, as experienced during the pandemic, allow organizational work to continue when physical locations are shut down or unavailable. The development of social media, video communication technologies, and software applications for meeting management has given virtual teams richer and more realistic communication environments where collaboration is facilitated (Schmidt, 2014; Schouten, van den Hooff, & Feldberg, 2016; Scott, 2013). Despite this, virtual teams face more difficulty with members separated by time, distance, and culture. In virtual teams, face-to-face communication is rare, with decisions and scheduling taking more time. In addition, they often have less trust, more conflict, and more subgroup formation. Breuer, Hüffmeier, and Hertel (2016) found that trust is an important factor when leading virtual teams because trust has been shown to be more important to virtual teams compared to face-to-face teams.

The Center for Creative Leadership worked with 141 virtual teams around the world and found that three key factors influence the effectiveness of virtual teams (Leslie & Hoole, 2018):

Technology. Effective team leadership uses technology to create connections among team members and make team members feel like they are working face-to-face. The use of videoconferencing (e.g., Zoom) became critical during the COVID-19 pandemic to allow for team success.Managing distance. In many cases, virtual teams work across different time zones, and accommodating differing schedules is important. Virtual team leadership must share the burden of early-morning and late-night meetings among team members so that certain members are not always the ones to accommodate the time zone differences. Physical distance is a challenge to the engagement of team members, and team leaders must work to ensure members’ commitment to team goals.Team structure. Virtual team leadership must carefully consider the members of the team and ensure that those on the team are committed. While this is true for all teams, it is even more critical in a virtual team, since it is easier for team members to “check out.” Often, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, some people were members of many different virtual teams, which resulted in less effort toward any one team and harmed the overall effectiveness.

Whether traditional or virtual, the organizational team-based structure is an important way for organizations to remain competitive by responding quickly and adapting to constant, rapid changes. Studies of both face-to-face and virtual teams have increasingly become focused on team processes and team outcomes (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Thomas, Martin, & Riggio, 2013). Also, researchers focused on the problems work teams confront as well as how to make these work teams more effective (Ilgen, Major, Hollenbeck, & Sego, 1993). Effective organizational teams lead to many desirable outcomes, such as

greater productivity,more effective use of resources,better decisions and problem solving,better-quality products and services, andgreater innovation and creativity (Parker, 1990)."

"However, for teams to be successful, the organizational culture needs to support member involvement. The traditional authority structure of many organizations does not support decision making at lower levels, and this can lead to the failure of many teams. Teamwork is an example of lateral decision making as opposed to the traditional vertical decision making that occurs in the organizational hierarchy based on rank or position in the organization. The dynamic and fluid power shifting in teams has been referred to as heterarchy (Aime, Humphrey, DeRue, & Paul, 2014). Such power shifting within teams can lead to positive outcomes as long as team members see these shifting sources of power as legitimate. Teams will have great difficulty in organizational cultures that are not supportive of such collaborative work and decision making. Changing an organizational culture to one that is more supportive of teams is possible, but it takes time and effort (Levi, 2011).

Leadership of teams has also become an important area of study. The ideas of “team leadership” are quite different from leadership within the organizational vertical structure. Many theories of leadership, such as situational (discussed in Chapter 5) and transformational (discussed in Chapter 8), can be applied in the team setting. However, team leadership is a unique setting for leadership, and it is very process oriented. How do teams develop their “critical capabilities”? How do team leaders shift their actions over time to deal with contingencies as they arise? How do leader actions promote task and interpersonal development (Kozlowski, Watola, Jensen, Kim, & Botero, 2009)? Effective team leadership facilitates team success and helps teams to avoid team failure (Stagl, Salas, & Burke, 2007; Stewart & Manz, 1995). Effective leadership processes are the most critical factor in team success (Zaccaro, Rittman, & Marks, 2001, p. 452).

Shared or Distributed Leadership.

The complexities of team processes demand the attention and focus of all members of the team. Some teams are autonomous and self-directed with no formal leader. But even those with a formal leader will benefit from shared leadership among team members. Team leadership functions can be performed by the formal team leader and/or shared by team members. Shared team leadership occurs when members of the team take on leadership behaviors to influence the team and to maximize team effectiveness (Bergman, Rentsch, Small, Davenport, & Bergman, 2012). Shared leadership has been referred to as team leadership capacity, encompassing the leadership repertoire of the entire team (Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2004). Such distributed leadership involves the sharing of influence by team members. Team members step forward when situations warrant, providing the leadership necessary, and then step back to allow others to lead. Such shared leadership has become more and more important in today’s organizations to allow faster responses to more complex issues (Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010; Pearce, Manz, & Sims, 2009; Solansky, 2008).

Shared leadership, while very important, does involve risk and takes some courage for the member who steps forward to provide leadership outside the formal role of team leader (Amos & Klimoski, 2014). Risks aside, teams with shared leadership have less conflict, more consensus, more trust, and more cohesion than teams that do not have shared leadership (Bergman et al., 2012). Shared leadership is even more important for virtual teams. Empowering leadership that shares power with virtual team members promotes both effective collaboration and performance (Drescher & Garbers, 2016; Hill & Bartol, 2016). Virtual teams are simply more effective when there is shared team leadership (Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014; Muethel et al., 2012; Wang, Waldman, & Zhang, 2014). How leaders and members can share the leadership of teams so that these teams can truly become effective and achieve excellence is discussed in this chapter. It introduces a model that provides a mental road map to help the leader or any team member providing leadership diagnose team problems and take appropriate action to correct those problems.

Team Leadership Model

The Hill Model for Team Leadership (Figure 16.1) is based on the functional leadership claim that the leader’s job is to monitor the team and then take whatever action is necessary to ensure team effectiveness. The model provides a tool for understanding the very complex phenomenon of team leadership, starting at the top with its initial leadership decisions, moving to leader actions, and finally focusing on the indicators of team effectiveness. In addition, the model suggests specific actions that leaders can perform to improve team effectiveness. Effective team leaders need a wide repertoire of communication skills to monitor and take appropriate action. The model is designed to simplify and clarify the complex nature of team leadership and to provide an easy tool to aid leadership decision making for team leaders and members alike.

Effective team performance begins with how the leader sees the situation that the team is experiencing (the leader’s mental model). This mental model reflects not only the components of the problem confronting the team, but also the environmental and organizational contingencies that define the larger context of team action. The leader develops a mental conception of what the team problem is and what solutions are possible in this context, given the environmental and organizational constraints and resources (Zaccaro et al., 2001).

To respond appropriately to the problem envisioned in the mental model, a good team leader needs to be behaviorally flexible and have a wide repertoire of actions or skills to meet the team’s diverse needs (Barge, 1996). When the leader’s behavior matches the complexity of the situation, the leader is behaving with “requisite variety,” or the set of behaviors necessary to meet the team’s needs (Drecksel, 1991). Effective team leaders are able to construct accurate mental models of the team’s problems by observing team functioning, and can take requisite action to solve these problems. Effective team leaders can diagnose correctly and choose the right action.

The leader has special responsibility for functioning in a manner that will help the team achieve effectiveness. Within this perspective, leadership behavior is seen as team-based problem solving, in which the leader attempts to achieve team goals by analyzing the internal and external situation and then selecting and implementing the appropriate behaviors to ensure team effectiveness (Fleishman et al., 1991). Leaders must use discretion about which problems need intervention, and make choices about which solutions are the most appropriate (Zaccaro et al., 2001). The appropriate solution varies by circumstance and focuses on what should be done to make the team more effective. Effective leaders have the ability to determine what leadership interventions are needed, if any, to solve team problems. When leadership is shared throughout the team, various members are diagnosing problems and intervening with appropriate behaviors. The monitoring and selection of behaviors is shared throughout the team membership. Given the complexity of team functioning, such shared leadership can—and, in fact, does—lead to greater team effectiveness."

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