Leadership in Teams: A Functional Approach to Understanding Leadership Structures and Processes

Abstract

As the use of teams has increased in organizations, research has begun to focus on the role of leadership in fostering team success. This review sought to summarize this literature and advance research and theory by focusing on leadership processes within a team and describing how team leadership can arise from four distinct sources inside and outside a team. Then, drawing from this inclusive, team-centric view of leadership, the authors describe 15 team leadership functions that help teams satisfy their critical needs and regulate their behavior in the service of goal accomplishment. This integrative view of team leadership enables the summarization of past research and identification of promising areas of future research.

How “situational” is judgment in situational judgment tests?

“…This means that they might ask themselves, "Does this response alternative generally make sense?" In the context of team knowledge, for instance, test takers might consider behaviors (e.g., monitoring success or solving problems, motivating team members, being fair, or supporting social climate) that are often included in team effectiveness models (e.g., Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010) and that are insightful as they list behaviors and courses of action that are generally assumed to have a positive impact on team performance. Hence, we expected that response options that included these general behaviors may be chosen by test takers when the situation description is absent.…”

How Does Project Supervisor Maintain Sustainability of Project Members? A Study from Leadership Perspective

“…By examining the effects of two core leadership skills, emotional healing and conceptual skill on project members innovative behavior, we can be more certain that the effect of emotional healing and conceptual skill are different, more generally, emotional healing has a positive linear impact on project members innovative behavior and there will be an inverted U-shape relationship between conceptual skill and project member innovative behavior. This paper responded to the call that research is needed on whether more specific leadership skills can have differential effects on individual performance and the impact mechanism of such leadership should be examined in future research [47].…”

Change Leadership: Oxymoron and Myths

“…This perspective, dominant in traditional leadership literature, fails to consider that leaders enact multiple functions (Fleishman et al, 1991;Gibb, 1954;House & Aditya, 1997;Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010) that are likely to be distributed among multiple people based on their knowledge and expertise rather than concentrated in a single individual or position (Gronn, 2002). Distributed or shared leadership is evident in leadership partners (e.g.…”

“…Jansen, 2004;Jansen & Hofmann, 2011) and phases (Prochaska, Redding, & Evers, 2002). These variations call for, and have an impact on, different forms and types of leadership (Van de Ven & Poole, 1995;Weick & Quinn, 1999), which suggests that different leadership behaviours will be required over the life of the change and challenges the assumption that an individual change leader will be effective throughout (Morgeson et al, 2010); there are no universal leaders (Yukl, 1994).…”