Kevin C. StaglEduardo SalasC. Shawn Burke
Team leadership is exalted as one of the most important factors driving the performance and ultimately the success of teams in organizations.[1] Not surprisingly, the totality of research evidence supports this assertion; team leadership is critical to achieving both affective[2] and behaviorally based[3] team outcomes. Team leadership is also a valued outcome of team performance, as witnessed by the additional leadership capacity generated as a team learns from navigating its internal and external challenges.[4]
This chapter provides a snapshot of the broad functions and specific behaviors team leaders must enact to create the conditions required for team effectiveness. The perspective advanced here suggests that team leaders influence the attainment of important team outcomes by creating five conditions that serve as a set of mutually reinforcing resources that teams draw upon when working toward efficacious performance.[5] According to Richard Hackman, a social and organizational psychology professor at Harvard University, team leaders can set the stage for team effectiveness by establishing (1) a real team that has (2) a compelling direction, (3) an enabling structure, (4) a supportive context, and (5) access to expert coaching.
Best practice leadership functions and behaviors are advanced as exemplars of what team leaders do to create these five conditions. In order to identity these best practices, frequently researched theories of leadership are leveraged, including functional leadership, transactional and transformational leadership, initiating structure and consideration, empowerment leadership, leader-member exchange, and boundary-spanning leadership. Moreover, the insights illuminated by initiatives undertaken to examine specific aspects of team leadership and or team performance are also provided to bolster the guidance this chapter offers practitioners charged with fostering team leadership and team effectiveness in the wild.
Team leadership is an ongoing process of influence.[6] Sometimes team leaders sway team members and teams directly via the use of a sequenced combination of proactive influence tactics (see Chapter 5). For example, transformational leaders often use inspirational appeals to energize team members’ higher-level needs, values, and ideals. The value of this approach is well documented, as research results suggest transformational behaviors account for 11 percent of the variance in team effectiveness and 6 percent of the variance in team productivity.[7] In contrast, transactional leaders exert their influence by relying upon apprising tactics to make rewards contingent upon effective performance. This approach is also valuable, as meta-analytic results suggest transactional behaviors account for 6 percent of the variance in team effectiveness.[8] Given the myriad of factors that contribute to and impinge upon team effectiveness and productivity, team leadership is a potent facilitator of these valued outcomes. Moreover, effective team leaders do not rigidly display a single type of leadership behavior, but rely upon a sequenced combination of monetary rewards and idealistic appeals to simultaneously extrinsically and intrinsically energize team member and team performance.
The evidence presented earlier supports the traditional view of team leadership, which conceptualizes team leaders as agents who influence team effectiveness by directly intervening in teamwork. While useful, this chapter extends this traditional perspective by adopting a more complex and a more encompassing view of how team leaders influence team effectiveness. The tenets of this approach suggest that while effective team leaders can directly intervene in teamwork, they are more likely to spend a majority of their time and effort influencing team effectiveness by putting in place a set of mutually reinforcing conditions.[9] These conditions, in turn, shape the tasks, performance strategies, team member and team actions, interventions undertaken by key stakeholders, and cultures that emanate within an organization before, during, and after performance episodes.
Team leaders fulfill functions and enact actions in order to establish a real team, with a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive context, and access to expert coaching.[10] In turn, these conditions influence how team members perceive the relationships between themselves and their teammates, between themselves and their team, between their team and its broader organizational context, and between their team and the environment external to the organization. For example, team leaders contribute to an enabling structure (combining tasks to promote teamwork) by engaging in empowering behaviors (allowing team members input into process control) to design work in a manner such that team members are encouraged to engage in self-management. Moreover, the conditions team leaders establish to influence team effectiveness interact, as was the case at Xerox Corporation, where well-designed teams reaped greater benefits from expert coaching and were undermined less by ineffective coaching.[11]
The impact of the five conditions team leaders establish is manifested in the effectiveness with which teams execute teamwork and team performance to produce team performance outcomes. These constructs, while tightly linked, are distinct phenomena.[12] Teams are complex entities, comprised of two or more individuals who interact socially, dynamically, episodically, and adaptively. Teams engage in teamwork, which is a set of adaptively enacted processes displayed by both team members (for example, communication) and teams (for example, coordination). Several initiatives have been undertaken to map the processes comprising teamwork.[13] Most have identified similar processes.
Teamwork is a necessary but insufficient condition for effective team performance. Team performance emerges as team members draw from their individual and collective resources to enact taskwork processes (for example, writing software code), team member processes (providing backup behavior to fellow programmers on a software development project team), and integrated team-level processes (such as the dynamic reallocation of capital during project team performance). For example, two members of a basketball team might draw from their shared situational awareness to execute a no-look pass. This example typifies a small slice of team performance because the team members call upon their shared reservoir of cognition to coordinate for a score. As team performance unfolds, higher-level contextual forces simultaneously shape and constrain interdependent interaction. In keeping with the basketball example, it is highly unlikely a no-look pass would be attempted during the last play of the game. This new scenario illustrates how situational factors in the team’s context impinge upon the types of cognitive and behavioral actions that ultimately comprise team performance. Thus, team performance is an emergent multilevel phenomenon resulting in performance outcomes and stakeholder judgments of team effectiveness.[14] The nature of team effectiveness is addressed in greater detail in the next section of the chapter.
As team performance unfolds, team members, team leaders, organizational stakeholders, strategic partners, and clientele develop and refine impressions about a team’s effectiveness. These parties continuously evaluate a team’s performance processes and outcomes against objective and subjective standards. Using these standards, they gauge the desirability of the actions undertaken and results produced by the team. When judgments are made about a team’s effectiveness, several criteria are often considered by concerned parties, including (1) whether a team’s product or service meets or exceeds the standards of the team’s clientele, (2) whether the social dynamic arising from team performance strengthened the capability of members to work together in the future, and (3) whether team members learned and had their own needs fulfilled.[15]
Given these assertions, team effectiveness is contingent upon both who is asked and the aspect of effectiveness in question. Despite this apparent complexity, effectiveness is often largely contingent upon whether a team meets its targeted production or service goals. This is no doubt a high standard, as contextual factors (for example, an economic recession, competitor innovation, supply shortages) outside a team’s control often impinge on team performance and sometimes serve to curtail team outputs. Furthermore, there are trade-offs between these standards. The single-minded pursuit of high levels of performance can be detrimental to the efficacy of newly formed teams and even derail the long-term viability of expert teams. Fortunately, stakeholders who judge the effectiveness of a team also typically consider whether a team grows as a result of its performance. Growth signals a team is more prepared to, and capable of, performing at a higher level during future performance episodes. The third criterion considered by parties making effectiveness judgments is whether team members learned and derived satisfaction from their interactions. When members’ needs are met by team performance, they are more likely to be intrinsically motivated by their work and persist in their efforts in the long run.[16]
The discussion of team leadership, teamwork, team performance, and team effectiveness, as presented thus far in this chapter, provides the conceptual foundation for illuminating what team leaders must do to facilitate these phenomena. The primary responsibility of team leaders seeking to foster team effectiveness is to establish and maintain a set of mutually reinforcing conditions that create, guide, and support teams.[17] Once instituted, teams draw upon these conditions before, during, and after task performance episodes. Thus, they serve to influence teams and their members and to increase the probability a team will ultimately be deemed effective on the standards discussed in the previous section.
Hackman suggests team leaders must establish five conditions to increase the likelihood teams will be judged effective on the three criteria noted above. These five prerequisite conditions for team effectiveness include creating (1) a real team, with (2) a compelling direction, (3) an enabling structure, (4) a supportive organizational context, and (5) expert coaching. The first three of these conditions contribute to the basic design of the team, whereas the latter two capitalize on this core. Each of these conditions is reviewed here in light of the assertions of several prominent theories of leadership. These theories of leadership are used to extract general functions and specific behaviors team leaders should enact to influence team effectiveness.
A team is not a mere collection of collocated experts who perform similar work and occasionally interact during goal accomplishment or afterward at the water cooler. In fact, real teams are quite different from this characterization: they perform team tasks, are bounded, and have delimited authority and stable membership.[18] Long before effectiveness can be achieved, team leaders must ensure these features are in place, functioning properly, and that team members clearly understand their implications for performance. Each of these features of a real team is discussed in the following pages and suggestions for establishing them are provided.
Define and create interdependencies.
Interdependence is one the primary reasons teams are formed, so it is not surprising that real teams with congruent task, goal, and feedback interdependencies are more effective.[19] Accumulating research evidence supports the importance of within-team interdependencies. For example, in information technology teams employed across thirteen Fortune 500 organizations in six industries, interdependence was found to be related to both team performance and member satisfaction.[20] A second example comes from multiple samples of teams in the financial services sector, where task, goal, and feedback interdependencies were found to be related to indices of team productivity, team effectiveness, and team member satisfaction.[21] A third example of the importance of fostering interdependence can be found in research conducted with customer service technician teams, where team independence moderated the influence of a customer driven quality system.[22] The results of this research suggested the intervention was greatly beneficial to interdependent customer service technician teams and actually detrimental to the performance of teams with low levels of interdependencies.
Hackman suggests that in order to leverage the benefits of teamwork, a team must actually do the work. However, intrateam links mandate higher levels of communication, cooperation, collaboration, and coordination among team members to meet stated objectives.[23] When a team’s interdependencies are undefined, ambiguous, or implicit, team leaders initiate structure[24] by organizing and coordinating collective activities in a manner that creates new, or capitalizes on existing, codependencies. Team leaders can initiate structure by creating complementary roles, superordinate goals, and shared outcomes. For example, senior stakeholders, team leaders, and management consultants can come together to institute a staffing solution that includes the individual assessment of potential team members for the purpose of diagnosing which roles within the team an applicant is predisposed to fill most effectively. By actively staffing the team, team leaders can help ensure complementary roles are filled.
Reinforce task interdependencies with congruent goals and feedback.
Once the coordination demands of a team’s task are identified, team leaders can reinforce these interdependencies by synchronizing team goals and performance feedback. Goals and goal-related feedback guide the allocation of resources during performance.[25] Feedback directs attention toward work efforts and provides the information required so that one can be accountable for one’s efforts.[26] Therefore, feedback should be aligned with both the tasks and the goals of a team. Team leaders who institute specific, difficult team goals rather than ambiguous team goals or individual goals should produce greater coordination and more effective performance.[27] For example, feedback should be delivered about how well the team is executing its performance strategies rather than directing members’ attention toward their own performance.
Identify who is responsible and accountable for outcomes.
The second feature of a real team is its boundaries. Easily identifiable boundaries clarify team members’ perceptions about who is ultimately accountable for team performance outcomes.[28] Explicit boundaries are particularly useful in organizations in which support staff temporarily step in to provide expertise about problems encountered by the team and thereby contribute to team performance. For example, the standard operating procedure of an organization may specify that research and development (R&D) teams should draw upon the joint resources of engineering, production, and sales when formulating innovative ideas. The continuous flow of engineers and sales representatives in and out of the R&D team may serve to create the illusion that someone other than the actual members of the R&D team will be held responsible for team outputs.
In order to avoid the scenario described, a team leader initiates structure[29] to keep a team informed of who is actually on the team and thereby responsible for team outcomes. There are a number of specific actions a team leader can enact to keep a team aware of who is responsible for achieving team effectiveness. For example, team leaders can demarcate boundaries by holding preliminary meetings to instill a shared understanding of a team’s purposes and membership. Team leaders can also create membership rosters that differentiate core members from the supporting cast.[30] Leaders can also establish norms that reinforce who will participate in team performance and at what times. Finally, clear channels of communication help ensure that members are kept up to date about incoming and exiting coworkers. A team Web page can provide a central location for members to receive and exchange this information via message postings, chat rooms, and digital avatars.
Designate the team’s decision making authority.
The third characteristic of real teams is they have limited authority for the core functions they fulfill, such as direction setting, designing, executing, monitoring, and managing performance processes. For example, an executive team of a small privately held corporation typically has free reign to set, execute, and manage the accomplishment of its strategic priorities. In contrast, the executive team of a publicly held firm typically answers to its board of directors and shareholders, so it has less discretion when it comes to changing agreed upon objectives.
Allocating authority is a balancing act for team leaders, because most teams in work settings are empowered to some degree to provide input into, and maintain control over, their operations. If the boundaries of a team’s authority are not clearly demarcated, however, team members may incorrectly intuit their power and either fail to seize opportunities or act inappropriately when actions are taken. In order to help ensure the proper balance is struck, team leaders initiate structure[31] to define which of the team’s core functions fall under its jurisdiction. Team leaders also initiate structure by informing teams about which of the team’s functions are under its domain of control. For example, team leaders can communicate the standards that must be achieved by the team in order to be empowered with additional responsibilities for various functions, such as managing its processes.
To help determine the extent of authority a team should have, it is first necessary to consider who is best suited to handle the functions a team fulfills.[32] One way to accomplish this is to assess a team’s capability to handle various aspects of its work. When teams are intact and have a history of working together, archival data from performance reviews can be collected or new observations can be made of the team in context.[33] In a newly formed team, the level of expertise and other competencies that team members bring to the table help determine the type of responsibilities they are prepared to handle going forward. In either case, team leaders should be prepared to relinquish at least some degree of control over various functions as the team matures and demonstrates its capabilities in context.
Strive to keep teams intact.
The final feature of real teams is that they are characterized by relatively stable membership.[34] In fact, research shows that longer tenures in management teams are associated with greater sales growth.[35] The implications of unstable team membership are grave, as witnessed by the fact that 73 percent of all aviation accidents occurred during the first flight an aviation crew had taken together.[36] Similarly, research suggests that position and personnel turbulence in tank crews results in lower levels of performance.[37] The positive effects of stability and negative implications of instability may be one of the reasons the National Football League (NFL) keeps its officiating crews intact for the entire regular season. A caveat does apply to this advice: in R&D teams and other settings in which creativity is highly desirable, research suggests there is a point of diminishing returns for team tenure at approximately the 5-year mark.[38]
Stable teams are better positioned for success because as they perform over time they develop shared cognitive, affective, and behavioral resources that are drawn upon when engaging in subsequent performance episodes. For example, as a ballet troupe’s performance unfolds across levels and time, its members develop shared mental models of the tasks they are performing and the capabilities of the team to engage in these tasks. Troupe members develop a shared understanding of each other’s specific strengths and weaknesses. This knowledge becomes ingrained so that when a particular sequence of maneuvers is best suited to the assets of a particular performer, that member is seamlessly called upon to practice. These cognitive models are not only essential to facilitating routine performance, they also guide the processes teams select and execute when adapting to change.[39]
In order to reap the benefits of stability, team leaders demonstrate consideration[40] so team members develop the shared commitment it takes to persist over the long run. Team leaders who show consideration by actively listening to team members’ suggestions and using elicited advice in making decisions foster more trust and commitment to the team. For example, when the management team of a Fortune 500 technology firm showed more consideration to member input during an executive program on strategic management, members were more committed to their team, trusted their leaders more, and made better quality decisions.[41] Similarly, leader-member exchange theory postulates that leaders can build a sense of obligation to the team by building dyadic relationships characterized by mutual trust and respect.[42]
The second condition team leaders establish to facilitate team effectiveness is a compelling direction.[43] According to Hackman, direction is compelling when it is challenging, clear, and consequential. Each of these three elements is apparent in the vision articulated by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). In 2004, the NHGRI funded and charged seven research teams with the long-term challenge of developing revolutionary technologies that facilitate the sequencing of a human genome for $1,000 or less. Such dramatic cost reductions would enable the sequencing of individual genomes as part of medical care and ultimately help physicians tailor therapies to an individual’s genetic profile.
When direction is challenging, such as the kind provided by the NHGRI, it energizes a team and thereby enhances its motivation to perform. Clear direction orients a team because it meshes the team’s performance strategy with its purposes. Direction that is consequential serves to engage teams and thereby helps ensure available human capital is fully employed during performance. Thus, a compelling direction serves three functions: it energizes, orients, and engages a team.[44] The activities team leaders undertake to provide direction that fulfills these functions are discussed next.
Exercise authority to establish a compelling direction.
Direction defines, communicates, and operationalizes a vision for teams, their members, their leaders, and stakeholders in the wider organization.[45] The direction articulated by team leaders must be challenging, clear, and consequential, not because it is framed or delivered in an exhilarating fashion but because a team’s purposes really are inspiring to its members. If a team’s purposes are by nature compelling, then direction that is challenging serves to energize members by stirring their motivational juices.
Team leaders fulfill the function of motivating personnel[46] by exercising authority to set direction for their teams. This type of direction precisely specifies desired end states but not the means of task accomplishment.[47] For example, with 75 percent of the 2005 NFL regular season complete, the Pittsburgh Steelers were faced with the real possibility of missing the playoffs. With the season on the line, head coach Bill Cowher went to the team’s whiteboard, on which the team’s objectives had been stated since the preseason, and wiped it clean. Cowher exercised his authority to set a new vision for the Steelers, a “one week at a time” philosophy. This approach revitalized the team’s spirit, led to eight straight victories, and guided the team to becoming the first number six playoff seed in history to win the Superbowl. The direction provided by Cowher precisely specified the desired end state for the team—a victory this week—but left plenty of room for him, his staff, and his team to craft and execute a flexible game plan for each opponent faced.
Stimulate and inspire by challenging the status quo.
Effective direction, like an effective mission statement, balances the possible and impossible.[48] The specific content of the direction a team receives must be dictated by the contingencies of the team under consideration. Direction given to stir a team to action must be neither too challenging nor too easy to fulfill. This kind of direction is most often associated with the charismatic/transformational genre of leadership.[49] For example, transformational senior leaders at 3M asked their action teams to do nothing short of increasing the technology at 3M by a quantum leap while concurrently slashing production development time by 50 percent.[50]
Transcendent aspirations have also been articulated by team leaders whose organizations faced a crisis. Wayne Hale, chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Space Shuttle Mission Management Team during space shuttle Discovery’s Return to Flight mission STS-114, once stated, “Do we have the judgment to weigh it all in the balance? Do we have the character to dare great deeds? History is watching.”[51] Under Hale’s watch, Discovery’s crew returned to flight, executed innovative in-orbit maneuvers, conducted unprecedented in-flight repairs, and rekindled the imagination of the inhabitants across our small blue planet.
Instill collective aspirations via a common mission.
A compelling direction does much more than stir the passions of a team’s members; it also serves to guide their ongoing activities. This is because effective direction orients team members by aligning a team’s performance strategy with its purposes.[52] A compelling direction makes salient the consistencies between a team member’s self-concept and the actions engaged in on behalf of the team.[53] For example, when members of U.S. Army infantry teams discuss their actions in postmission debriefings they often use the word we instead of I. Socialization processes, experience, and leader actions serve to ensure the self-concepts of these soldiers are thoroughly intertwined with the shared core values underlying the mission of their team, squad, platoon, and company. Defining themselves in terms of the larger collective becomes as implicit as always having one’s weapon within reach.
In order for direction to instill a collective identity and thereby orient a team, team leaders define a common mission so that team members understand that subordinating their own self-interests can help facilitate the achievement of overriding objectives. One way team leaders do this is by engaging in transformational leadership[54] to define team member roles in terms of ideological values. For example, when the leaders of the previously noted infantry teams define member responsibilities in terms of exemplifying collective values (for example, treat prisoners of war with respect), each member has a standard for interpreting his or her own contemplated actions. Thus, overarching values serve as precepts when a team develops or selects task performance strategies. In this manner, direction provides a common criterion that can be used to evaluate alternative ways of proceeding, which can be useful when several paths seem equally appealing.[55]
Provide consequential direction to fully engage talent.
The third function good direction serves is to engage team members. When direction is consequential for a team, the team is more likely to draw upon the full repertoire of its members’ experiences, expertise, and competencies during task performance.[56] Moreover, by providing direction that has important consequences for the team, team leaders create the impetus for senior team members to monitor the actions of more junior team members. In turn, mutual performance monitoring is critical to providing timely backup behavior when less experienced members are overloaded or are making errors during task performance.
Team leaders provide engaging direction by enacting functional leadership behaviors that help ensure the maximum utilization of team member talent.[57] One means of ensuring that a team’s capabilities are fully engaged is to develop task cohesion by proactively discussing a team’s goals, objectives, and performance standards.[58] By linking the tasks at hand to agreed-upon performance standards and goals, team members can more readily perceive the connections between their actions and the consequences of those actions for collective success.
The third condition that team leaders create to foster team effectiveness is an enabling structure.[59] An enabling structure simultaneously provides the broad framework in which teams operate while providing the flexibility for teams to decide the specific manner in which operations will be conducted. According to Hackman, there are three structural features that team leaders shape to create an enabling structure: (1) the design of a team’s work, (2) the establishment and enforcement of norms of conduct, and (3) the manner in which teams are staffed or composed. Each of these three aspects of an enabling structure is discussed next.
Promote self-goal setting, self-observation, and self-reward.
The first feature of an enabling structure is the design of the work that teams are charged to perform. According to the tenets of job characteristics theory,[60] sociotechnical systems theory,[61] and cognitive evaluation theory,[62] the tasks teams perform should be designed so workers have some measure of authority or discretion over their work. For example, Volvo empowered teams at its Kalmar (Sweden) plant to be responsible for an entire portion of the automobile manufacturing process. By eschewing the traditional scientific management approach, whereby employees only work on a very small piece of an automobile, in favor of a process where teams craft a larger product from start to finish, Volvo provided the team with skill variety and a sense of task ownership. This approach served to both motivate and satisfy Volvo’s incumbents, who eventually came to produce some of the finest driving machines on the road.
Team leaders can create this sense of ownership by engaging in empowering behaviors aimed at increasing the self-management of the team and its members.[63] Leaders should design the work that teams perform to include several core characteristics in order to promote within-team goal setting, observation, and reward. These job dimensions include skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback. The first of these dimensions, skill variety, can be created by combining tasks as illustrated in the Volvo example given and by establishing relationships with clients.[64] The second dimension, task identity, is engendered by forming natural work units and combining tasks. Leaders can create task significance by forming natural units of work. Autonomy is created when teams are charged with managing client relations and via vertical loading, a process whereby teams are empowered to handle additional management responsibilities. The final dimension, feedback, is generated via team-client interactions and by the leader’s efforts to open communication channels throughout the organization.[65]
Establish norms for how the team scans its environment for opportunities and what teams must and cannot do to seize opportunities.
The second feature of an enabling structure is norms of conduct. Norms are structural characteristics of a team that regulate and regularize its behavior.[66] Team leaders establish norms of conduct to reinforce desired behaviors and sanction inappropriate actions. For example, managers at Xerox who participated in focus groups suggested that one of the core drivers of customer service team effectiveness is norms.[67] In this setting, norms were defined as common expectations for the behavior of work group members, and particularly those with special responsibilities. Not surprisingly, subsequent research supported the managers’ views: norms were related to objective indices of performance, customer satisfaction, and manager ratings of team effectiveness.[68] Norms can also arise informally, as witnessed by the production norms discovered at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company nearly a century ago.[69]
In order to establish basic norms of conduct, team leaders initiate structure[70] for the team by specifying in detail what is deemed (un)acceptable conduct during task performance. Hackman[71] suggests that team leaders must specify outward-looking norms that address how teams monitor and interact with their operational context and specify what must be done and not done in relation to opportunities arising in this environment. For example, the provision of timely upward feedback delivered from regionally dispersed teams to a central location may be mandated in one organization (for example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and disregarded or even antithetical to operations in another organization (for example, LDDS World-Com). External norms of conduct are complemented by secondary norms addressing within-team behavior. These norms address social interactions, acceptable member behavior, and applications of rules and regulations.[72] Once crystallized, the mere visualization of one’s fellow teammates’ disapproval can be a powerful deterrent.[73]
Allocate the optimal number and mix of personnel.
The third aspect of an enabling structure is team composition. In regard to this feature, leaders engage in functional behaviors to allocate personnel[74] to ensure a team has an appropriate size and composition. Team leaders allocate personnel to teams in a manner that actively manages a team’s size, diversity of talent, balance of knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics because research suggests each of these aspects has important implications for team functioning and effectiveness.[75]
Team leaders manage the composition of a team in part by ensuring that it has the optimal number of team members to execute its functions. In this regard, leaders of effective teams lean toward assigning too few team members to accomplish a team’s tasks rather than assigning too many, because while organizations can have slack resources, teams cannot.[76] The rationale behind this assertion suggests that as team size increases, so too do the coordination demands, motivational decrements, and other process losses associated with teamwork.[77] Not surprisingly, accumulated research results support this line of thinking.[78] It seems a negatively accelerated function exists between team size and performance such that there are diminishing returns for extra members. Research suggests the optimal number of team members is between four and seven.[79]
Team leaders also actively balance the mixture of knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics on a team in order to produce an optimal blend.[80] Team leaders produce an appropriate balance of characteristics within a team by leveraging their organization’s human capital systems to hire or fire team members, develop existing members, or secure the services of ad hoc members.[81] Traditionally, team leaders have used these systems to staff their teams with the highest mean levels of the targeted characteristic in question. However, the results of a new wave of research have begun to challenge this philosophy. For example, the results of one initiative suggest the proportion of extraverted members on a team is curvilinearly related to performance.[82] This suggests that too many extraverted members on a team can be detrimental to team performance and thereby team effectiveness.
Thus far in this chapter, three conditions have been discussed that team leaders put in place to increase the probability a team and its products and/or services will be deemed effective. These three conditions—a real team, a compelling direction, and an enabling structure—contribute to the basic design of a team.[83] The remainder of the chapter discusses two additional conditions—a supportive organizational context and expert coaching—that reinforce this basic design. This subsection addresses the actions team leaders take to provide a supportive organizational context, which includes establishing a reward system, an information system, and an educational system. The final condition, expert coaching, deals with the activities team leaders engage in to develop teams and team members before, during, and after performance.
Implement team-based performance-contingent rewards.
Once a team leader has organized a team’s work into team tasks, it is important not to undermine established interdependencies by holding particularly (un)successful individual team members largely accountable for team performance outcomes.[84] In practice, this is often difficult to do, because in most organizations exceptional individual performance is exalted at the expense of collective achievements. This is unfortunate, because leaders who reward individual performance and expect team performance send mixed signals about what is really valued both by the leader and in the wider organization. In fact, research suggests teams perform at higher levels when their reward system and tasks are consistent.[85]
Team leaders are charged with fostering team motivation and coordination, and thereby effective team outcomes, so a new mindset is required. Rather than rewarding one thing and expecting another, effective team leaders engage in transactional behaviors[86] to strengthen the linkages between team processes and team rewards. Team leaders must establish and communicate the transactional linkages between valued team rewards, such as pay, promotion, management recognition, desirable work assignments and schedules, and time off, and the coordinated exchanges teams enact.[87] For example, one director at a large telecommunications firm showed pictures of the exotic vacation locations team members could visit if they achieved targeted collective outcomes.[88] This type of transactional leadership serves to bolster team interdependencies by creating the expectancy that collective effort will result in adaptive coordinated exchanges that are, in turn, instrumental to securing valued team rewards.[89]
Institutionalize multitiered reward systems.
While the contingencies between team-level performance and team-level rewards must be clear and meaningful, team leaders must also reinforce the developmental efforts of team members in order to promote the third criterion of team effectiveness. Hackman suggests the third criterion of team effectiveness is whether or not team members learned and grew as a result of their interactions and experiences during team performance. This creates a conundrum for team leaders, who must reward individual growth while not overemphasizing individual achievement and thereby undermining team performance.
The solution, Hackman suggests, is for team leaders to institutionalize multitiered reward systems. Essentially, team leaders fulfill the function of motivating personnel[90] by linking mutually reinforcing rewards that promote individual growth, team effectiveness, and overall organizational performance. One way to accomplish this is to phase in team performance as a distinct facet of each team member’s performance evaluation.[91] For example, General Foods’ Topeka, Kansas, plant used reward systems that compensated employees for mastering both individual and team competencies.[92] This type of system places the onus on members to self-develop.
Ensure provided information is performance targeted.
Information systems provide teams with mission-critical data needed to plan, execute, and monitor their work activities. The information provided by these systems is particularly important as teams navigate the permanent whitewater created by the rapid pace of change in a global village.[93] For example, research with customer service work teams in a Fortune 500 firm suggested work group support, in terms of providing necessary information and helping teams to utilize information for continuous improvement, was related to indices of response time and manager ratings of performance effectiveness.[94] Moreover, in teams of knowledge workers at multiple organizations, information transmission was related to team performance, team commitment, and team satisfaction.[95]
Although teams often have difficulties setting up an information management system,[96] with the increasing power and affordability of information technologies it is increasingly feasible to provide teams with real-time data about their performance and performance context. What is needed is for team leaders to manage the kinds and flow of information a team receives so that collectives have access to actionable information rather than mountains of unusable data. This requires team leaders to engage in boundary spanning behaviors[97] whereby they work closely with parties in their organization or outside vendors who design the information systems a team will rely upon. Team leaders should engage in networking communication with information system designers and programmers to help ensure teams get information about their current performance as well as insight into ongoing changes in production and service that could alter the timing or pace of future performance episodes. For example, Mitsubishi uses a “House of Quality” approach to translate customer-expressed needs into the language of engineers.[98] Team leaders at Mitsubishi manage this interface to help ensure their teams have targeted information to design better products and thereby more fully satisfy their clientele.
Negotiate access to sensitive information if it facilitates planning and selection of performance strategies.
It might be trite to say information is power, but nevertheless it is true. Senior stakeholders know all too well that their competitors want to know what they know so they can leverage it to their competitive advantage. This is why the really good stuff is kept under lock and key or is floating through cyberspace encrypted. Unfortunately, this veil of secrecy often prevents the very teams who need specific information to set and adjust their task performance strategies from getting it in a timely manner, if at all.[99]
In order to foster a supportive context, team leaders must engage in boundary spanning behaviors[100] to proactively search the team, organization, and environment to procure resources. For example, team leaders engage in ambassadorial activities by presenting a compelling case to information gatekeepers why the risk of not giving teams access to important information is greater than the risk of giving it to them and having it leaked to competitors. Ambassadorial activities aimed at securing resources have been found to be related to budget and schedule compliance, team processes, and innovation. Other boundary spanning behaviors, such as providing access to the workflow structure, creating tighter couplings with other teams, and adding expertise to the team, were also found to be related to indices of team effectiveness.[101]
Provide and secure developmental opportunities.
The function of an educational system is to provide whatever knowledge, skills, attitudes, and other characteristics a team needs to fulfill its purposes. Often, the largest component of an educational system is formally administered training programs. Leaders schedule training as a planned intervention to enhance the direct determinants of team performance, including job-relevant knowledge, skill, and volitional choice behavior.[102] In turn, differences in direct determinants are a function of indirect determinants such as training, socialization, cognitive and psychomotor abilities, personality characteristics, experience, and organizational initiatives.[103]
Team leaders must conduct or arrange for formal training because teams are not always prepared to handle the challenges they are asked to navigate. One example of the successful use of formal training can be found in the aviation industry, which relies upon crew resource management (CRM) training as a strategy to reduce the 60 percent to 80 percent of accidents attributed to human error.[104] There is voluminous evidence that suggests CRM interventions are effective and well received in the aviation community.[105]
Expert coaching is the final condition team leaders put in place to facilitate team effectiveness.[106] This condition interacts with the previous four conditions, as was found by research conducted at Xerox, where well-designed teams benefited more from team coaching than their poorly designed counterparts.[107] Team coaching is defined herein as a “direct interaction with a team intended to help members make coordinated and task-appropriate use of their collective resources in accomplishing the team’s work.”[108] This definition makes clear that the purpose of coaching is to help teams perform the taskwork and teamwork processes at the heart of team performance rather than to address the quality of members’ interpersonal relationships. This emphasis is different than most existing approaches to coaching (for example, process consultation, team building), which voluminous evidence suggests may be useful for affecting attitudes and clarifying roles, but have little impact on improving team performance.[109]
More broadly, this perspective reflects a shift in the conceptualization of the nature of what leaders do and when they do it to facilitate team effectiveness. Traditionally, team leaders have been viewed as domineering figures whose purpose it was to provide explicit directions, closely monitor progress, and make important decisions on behalf of the team. In the past decade, however, team leadership has been reframed in terms of predominantly consisting of coaching and facilitating team performance, rather than directing and controlling performance.[110]
In order to offset process losses and produce process gains, coaching interventions are most needed at the beginning, midpoint, and ending of team performance, although they are delivered at other times as well.[111] Coaching delivered by team leaders at the beginning of team performance is motivational in nature and is utilized to target a team’s effort. In contrast, coaching delivered at the midpoint of team performance is consultative in nature and is used to help a team select appropriate performance strategies. Coaching delivered at the end of team performance is educational in nature and is delivered to develop team competence. At all three time periods, the team reflects upon its prior performance to distill lessons learned that can guide subsequent performance episodes.
Intervention in the form of team coaching is a matter of timing; leaders must seek out natural opportunities to create learning experiences. Team leaders must consider the readiness of the team to receive a coaching intervention. Two aspects of readiness are pertinent to consider: the degree to which the team has available resources to attend to the intervention and the degree to which the issues addressed by the intervention are naturally salient for the team.[112] In regard to the first of these issues, most teams experience cyclical variations in task intensity, complexity, and workload.[113] During low workload periods, team leaders can guide a process whereby a team reviews and reflects on its previous performance episodes and prepares to engage in future performance. When a team shifts its resources back to task performance, team leaders can monitor the team to assess whether agreed-upon strategies are being executed and whether established goals are being met. In this manner, team leaders synchronize a team’s task performance and learning cycles.
In addition to concerns about cyclical variations in workload, team leaders should also take into account when particular issues are most salient for a team.[114] Research on temporal issues in teams suggests there are natural transitions that teams make as they work toward a deadline.[115] The phases teams move through are demarcated by unique focal issues. When certain issues are more salient for teams, they are more readily addressed by team coaching. Thus, a team leader provides coaching at critical junctures rather than acting as a supervisor who continuously intervenes as performance unfolds. The behaviors leaders enact to provide team coaching at the beginnings, midpoints, and endings of team performance are discussed next.
Utilize prebriefings to instill shared affect, cognition, and behavior.
Prebriefings set the stage for subsequent team performance.[116] For example, research with aviation crews suggested a team leader’s communications during prebriefings created a climate of teamwork, which, in turn, had a significant impact on the frequency and effectiveness of compensatory behaviors demonstrated by the crews.[117] These findings are bolstered by the results of research with manufacturing teams, which suggested team coaching was related to the development of team psychological safety, team learning, and team performance.[118] Moreover, research also suggests leader prebriefings are a vehicle through which to impart shared mental models and thereby routine and adaptive performance.[119]
Team leader coaching interventions delivered prior to team performance target a team’s collective motivation and commitment to perform as a cohesive unit.[120] For example, team leaders can engage in transformational behaviors[121] to evoke a shared mission and a shared belief in the team’s capability to execute a mission successfully. This type of supportive behavior can instill a sense of competency specific team efficacy as well as generalized potency.[122] Team leaders can also use a questioning approach that encourages discussion and informal reinforcements when suggestions are raised in order to create a climate for teamwork. Similarly, team leaders who provide supportive, nondefensive responses to questions can create psychological safety or the shared belief the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.[123] Team leaders also establish open channels of communication during prebriefings by encouraging team members to share their thoughts and concerns prior to task performance.
Offer novel task performance strategies.
Team leader coaching interventions delivered at the midpoint of task performance are undertaken to review the performance strategies that have been employed by a team during its prior performance.[124] The purpose of reviewing and reflecting on current performance strategies is to identify approaches that make better use of available resources or are a better fit to new challenges that have arisen in a team’s context. Examining current performance strategies allows a team to tweak the fit of these approaches with the environmental contingencies present in a team’s operational context.[125]
Team leaders initiate structure[126] at the midpoints of team task performance by identifying how current strategies can be altered or by suggesting the use of novel performance strategies that may be more appropriate for accomplishing a team’s objectives. For example, team leaders can provide situation assessment updates on how the team is doing, what the team should be doing, and what can be done to adapt to a changing situation. During this process, team leaders should communicate situational contingencies that could change a team’s goals or subgoals, as well as alternative strategies for responding to these contingencies.[127] Moreover, team leaders use the midpoints of task performance to encourage team members to continually scan their operational environment to identify and anticipate significant challenges on the horizon that may impact their newly revised performance strategy as the team completes its performance episode.
Engage teams in a two-way discussion of lessons learned and how they can be utilized to address challenges on the horizon.
Team leader coaching interventions at the end of performance are educational in nature because they target a team’s knowledge, skill, and emergent states (that is, collective efficacy, shared mental models, psychological safety) for development.[128] A postaction review is a systematic process during which members, leaders, and other concerned stakeholders share their observations of a team’s performance processes and outcomes.[129] Despite the favorable or unfavorable outcome(s) of a team’s coordinated efforts, this time should be set aside for learning, with a focus on fostering future performance improvements.[130]
Team leaders use the endings of team task performance to develop a team’s competence by questioning team members’ understanding of why they engaged in particular team and task processes. A central aspect of this endeavor is to encourage a team to generate explanations for its performance. This line of questioning, which compels team members to mindfully reflect over their prior performance, facilitates the development of strategic knowledge and shared mental models that, in turn, guide future performance episodes. Leaders also use the endings of team performance to recognize and reinforce spontaneous displays of effective team processes.
Research conducted with U.S. Navy teams has identified eight team leader behaviors that characterize an effective postaction review. Specifically, team leaders conducting postbriefings should (1) provide a self-critique early in the review, (2) accept feedback and ideas from others, (3) avoid person-oriented feedback, (4) provide specific constructive suggestions, (5) encourage active team member participation in lieu of simply stating one’s own observations and interpretations of team performance, (6) discuss both teamwork and taskwork processes, (7) make reference to lessons learned from prior prebriefs, and (8) vocalize satisfaction when a team or its members demonstrate improvements.[131]
Organizational scholars have advanced a myriad of theories of leadership that make somewhat unique assertions about what leaders do and how they go about doing it.[132] In fact, it has been asserted that “there are almost as many definitions of leadership as those who have attempted to define the concept.”[133] Although the authors believe each of these approaches offers a unique lens through which to understand team leadership, differentiation without integration ultimately results in chaos.
This chapter consolidated the burgeoning number of approaches to understanding team leadership under Hackman’s five conditions for team effectiveness. Nearly 100 years of leadership theory and empirical research was applied to illuminate what team leaders do to put in place the conditions that facilitate team effectiveness. Thus, this chapter breaks from the tradition of touting a single theory as the most appropriate framework and thereby answers the call to illuminate a broader array of what leaders do in teams.[134]
From the perspective advanced herein, the science and art of fostering team effectiveness becomes an ongoing process of creating a real team, which has a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive context, and access to expert coaching. The following best practices should be adhered to when establishing and sustaining effective teams:
Team leaders create real teams by defining team task interdependencies and reinforcing those linkages with congruent goals and performance feedback. Moreover, team leaders identify who is currently accountable for team outcomes and designate the decision making authority responsible parties have for their work.
Team leaders articulate a compelling direction by exercising their authority to establish common objectives that stimulate and inspire teams by challenging the status quo. Moreover, by communicating a common mission that is consequential to those who undertake it, direction serves to fully engage a team’s talents.
Team leaders establish an enabling structure by designing a team’s work so its members take ownership of their tasks. They set boundaries for acceptable behavior by specifying what teams must and cannot do to seize opportunities and how within-team dyadic interactions should be conducted. Moreover, they strive to create an optimal blend within the team by allocating an appropriate number and mix of personnel to a team.
Team leaders help ensure a supportive organizational context exists by institutionalizing multitiered performance-contingent reward systems. Moreover, they work with support personnel and senior stakeholders to ensure the information provided to a team is performance targeted and that there are ample opportunities for team development.
Team leaders provide expert coaching by seeking natural opportunities to create learning experiences, particularly at the beginnings, midpoints, and endings of team performance. Through the use of prebriefings and postaction reviews, team leaders distill lessons learned, instill shared affect, cognition, and behavior, and offer novel task performance strategies that can be utilized to address upcoming challenges or adapt to current contingencies.
Although far from exhaustive, these practices can help guide team leaders along the path to achieving team effectiveness. Team leaders who spend a majority of their time establishing these five conditions rather than directly intervening in team performance will likely find that their teams are increasingly capable and willing to adaptively respond in a coordinated manner, and thus they and their teams will ultimately be deemed more effective in the wild.