UNIT NINE
TEAM LEADERSHIP
Introduction
Defining Elements of a Team
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.
A group of people formed for accomplishing a goal.
Interdependence: The success of individuals depends on the success
of the team.
Commitment to work together and communicate regularly
Accountable as a unit in a larger organizational context.
Team Leadership Perspective
• Team success is highly dependent on leadership
• The leadership functions can be performed by a formal leader
or shared by team members.
– Distributed (shared) leadership involves the sharing of influence
by team members who step forward when situations warrant
providing the leadership necessary and then stepping back to
allow others to lead.
– Shared leadership has become more and more important in
today’s organizations to allow faster responses to more complex
issues
Team Leadership
• The dynamic and fluid power shifting in teams has been
referred to as heterarchy.
• 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.
Team Leadership
• 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.
• For teams to be successful, the organizational culture needs
to support member involvement
• Teams with shared leadership have less conflict, more
consensus, more trust, and more cohesion than teams that do
not have shared leadership
Team Leadership Perspective
• 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, and
greater innovation and creativity.
Team Leadership Model
Kogler Hill’s Team Leadership Model
•The Model is based on the claim that the leader’s job is to
monitor the team and then take whatever action is
necessary to ensure team effectiveness.
•This model provides the leader or a team member with a
mental road map to help
Diagnose team problems, and
Take appropriate actions to correct team problems
Team Leadership Model
• Effective team performance begins with the leader’s
mental model of the situation.
• Mental model reflects
– Components of the problem
– Environmental & organizational contingencies
• 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
Team Leadership Model
• 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.
• 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.
Team Leadership Model
• 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.
• Leaders must use discretion about which problems need
intervention, and make choices about which solutions are
the most appropriate.
Team Leadership Model
• The model provides a tool for understanding the very
complex phenomenon of team leadership:
• Three Main Components
Leadership Decisions
Leadership Actions (Internal & External)
Team Effectiveness
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Decisions
• Leadership Decision 1: Should I monitor the team or take action?
• A leader must first seek out information to understand the
current state of the team’s functioning (information search),
• The information must be organized, analyzed, and interpreted
so the leader can decide how to act (information structuring).
• Leaders can also focus on problems within the group (internal)
or problems outside the group (external).
• These two dimensions result in the four types of group
leadership functions
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Decisions
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Decisions
Leadership Decision 2: Should I intervene to meet task or relational
needs?
The second decision confronting the leader is whether the
team needs help in dealing with relational issues or task issues.
Both types of leadership behaviors (task focused and
person-focused) have been found to be related to
perceived team effectiveness (Burke et al., 2006).
Superior team leadership focuses constantly on both task
and maintenance functions (Kinlaw, 1998).
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Decisions
Leadership Decision 3: Should I intervene internally or
externally?
If a decision was made to take action or intervene, the leader
must determine what level of the team process needs leadership
attention: internal leadership actions or external leadership
actions.
Effective team leaders analyze and balance the internal
and external demands of the team and react appropriately
(Barge, 1996).
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Actions
• The next section of Hill’s Model lists a number of specific
leadership actions that can be performed internally or
externally.
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Actions
Internal Task Leadership Actions:
•The task box on Hill’s Model for Team Leadership lists the set of skills or
actions that the leader might perform to improve task performance.
Goal focusing (clarifying, gaining agreement)
Structuring for results (planning, visioning, organizing, clarifying roles,
delegating)
Facilitating decision making (informing, controlling, coordinating,
mediating, synthesizing, focusing on issues)
Training team members in task skills (educating, developing)
Maintaining standards of excellence (assessing team and individual
performance, confronting inadequate performance)
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Actions
Internal Relational Leadership Actions:
•The second set of internal leadership actions reflects those that the leader needs
to implement to improve team relationships.
Coaching team members in interpersonal skills
Collaborating (including, involving)
Managing conflict and power issues (avoiding confrontation)
Building commitment and esprit de corps (being optimistic, innovating,
envisioning, socializing, rewarding, recognizing)
Satisfying individual member needs (trusting, supporting, advocating)
Modeling ethical and principled practices (fair, consistent, normative)
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Actions
External Environmental Leadership Actions:
•The external leadership actions reflect those actions the leader might
implement to improve the environmental interface with the team.
•Real-life teams do not exist in a laboratory—they are subsystems of
the larger organizational and societal context.
•To stay viable, the team needs to monitor this environment closely
and determine what actions should be taken to enhance team
effectiveness
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Actions
External Environmental Leadership Actions:
•If environmental monitoring suggests a leadership intervention, then the leader
needs to select from the following functions:
Networking and forming alliances in environment (gathering information,
increasing influence)
Advocating and representing team to environment
Negotiating upward to secure necessary resources, support, and
recognition for team
Buffering team members from environmental distractions
Assessing environmental indicators of team’s effectiveness (surveys,
evaluations, performance indicators)
Sharing relevant environmental information with team
Team Leadership Model: Leadership Actions
• It is up to the leader to assess what action, if any, is needed and then
intervene with the specific leadership function to meet the demands
of the situation.
• To be an effective leader the leader needs;
the ability to perform these actions (skills)
to make a strategic choice as to the most appropriate action that
is required of the situation.
• Thus, it is the job of the leader to analyze and mediate the situation
to make the best decisions for the good of the team.
Team Leadership Model: Team Effectiveness
“Team Effectiveness,” focuses on team excellence or the
desired outcomes of teamwork.
•Two critical functions of team effectiveness are
performance (task accomplishment) and
development (team maintenance).
Team Leadership Model: Team Effectiveness
• Team performance is the “quality the outcomes of
teamwork in terms of problems solved and work
completed.
• Team development is the cohesiveness of the team and the
ability of group members to satisfy their own needs
while working effectively with other team members.
• Excellent teams accomplish both of these objectives:
getting the job done and maintaining a cohesive team.
Team Leadership Model: Team Effectiveness
Team leaders need to understand the conditions that
contribute to or enable team excellence.
Such understanding will allow the leader to bench- mark or
compare his or her team’s performance to these standards and
to determine possible areas of team weakness or ineffectiveness.
Characteristics of Team Effectiveness
• Clear, Elevating Goal: Team goals must be very clear so that
one can tell whether the performance objective has been
realized. Groups often fail because they are given a vague
task and then asked to work out the details.
• Results-Driven Structure: Teams need to find the best
structure for accomplishing their goals. Structural features
that lead to effective teamwork include task design, team
composition, and core norms of conduct
Team Leadership Model: Team Effectiveness
• Competent Team Members: Team members need to possess
the requisite technical competence to accomplish the team’s
goals-sufficient information, education, and training
• Unified Commitment: Excellent teams are carefully
developed with a sense of unity or identification. Such team
spirit often can be developed by involving members in all
aspects of the process
Team Leadership Model: Team Effectiveness
• Collaborative Climate: To build an atmosphere that fosters
collaboration, we need to develop trusting relationships based
on honesty, openness, consistency, and respect. Integration of
individual actions is one of the fundamental characteristics of
effective teams
• Standards of Excellence: Effective group norms are important
for group functioning. The standards must be clear and
concrete, and all team members must be required to perform to
standard
Team Leadership Model: Team Effectiveness
• External Support and Recognition: A supportive organizational
context includes material resources, rewards for excellent
performance, and an information system to provide data
needed to accomplish the task
• Principled Leadership: Effective team leadership is the central
driver of team effectiveness. Effective team leaders are
committed to the team’s goals and give members autonomy to
unleash their talents when possible.
How Does The Team Leadership Model
Work?
• Team leaders and team members can use the model to
help them make decisions about the current state of their
team and the specific actions they need to take, if any, to
improve the team’s functioning.
• The model portrays leadership as a team oversight
function in which the leader’s role is to do whatever is
necessary to help the team achieve effectiveness.
How Does The Team Leadership Model
Work?
• In using the model, the team leadership engages in the
leader mediation process by deciding which option is most
appropriate for the team: monitoring or taking action.
• If monitoring reveals that action is needed, then the
leadership decides whether to take an internal- level action
or an external-level action or both.
• Finally, the leadership decides which action is appropriate
to meet the needs of the team.
Strengths
1. The real-life focus on performance and team effectiveness
enables leaders and members to diagnose and correct
team problems.
2. A second strength of the model is that it provides a
cognitive guide that helps leaders to design and maintain
effective teams, especially when performance is below
standards
Strengths
3. The model takes into account the changing role of leaders
and followers in organizations (shared leadership).
4. The model does not focus on the position of power of a
leader, but instead focuses on the critical functions of
leadership as diagnosis and action taking
5. This approach to team leadership can help in selection of
team leaders and team members
Weaknesses
1. The model ignores many skills that leadership might
need to employ in decision making. A team might
need to modify the model to include skills that are
particularly relevant to its effectiveness.
2. Even though the model does not include all possible
leadership skills, it is still quite complex. Team
leaders need to spend time adjusting to the
framework so that it comes naturally to them when
decisions are needed. problems.
Weaknesses
3. This framework also does not provide on-the-spot
answers to specific problems facing the team leader, such
as “When is the best time to intervene?” “What do you
say to a member who is upset and crying?”
Case Study
They Dominated the Conversation
The local cancer center has a health team designed to coordinate the care of children with cancer. The team is
composed of a physician, Dr. Sherif Hidyat (a clinical oncologist); a radiologist, Dr. Wayne Linett; a nurse
practitioner, Sharon Whittling; a social worker, Cathy Ing; a physical therapist, Nancy Crosby; and a child life
worker, Janet Lewis. The team members meet on a weekly basis to discuss the 18 children under their care and
agree on the best course of treatment for each child. Cathy Ing, the social worker, is the head of the team and is
responsible for the case management of each child. However, when the team meets, Drs. Hidyat and Linett
dominate the conversation. They feel that their medical background gives them greater knowledge and skill in
treating cancer in children. They welcome input from the women in the group. When it comes to making a
decision, however, they insist on doing it their way for the good of the patient. Cathy Ing (the social worker),
Janet Lewis (the child life worker), Nancy Crosby (the physical therapist), and Sharon Whittling (the nurse
practitioner) resent this behavior because they are the health care workers who spend the most time with the
children and feel that they know best how to handle their long-term care. As a result, the patients feel as if no
one cares or understands them. The team is also having trouble working together, and no one on the team is
satisfied with the outcome.
Case Study
Questions
1. How would you assess the effectiveness of this team?
2. In monitoring this team, at what level and function do you see the most serious problems? Internal task?
Internal relational? External?
3. Would you take action to improve team functioning? If so, how would you intervene? Why?
4. What specific leadership skill or skills would you use to improve group functioning?
