Content area
Full Text
There have been few systematic studies of the success factors underlying effective team leadership. Analysis often focus group transcripts from five companies revealed twenty important team leader qualities. These qualities were defined and compared to previous findings in both general leadership and team leadership literatures, supplementing existing taxonomies. The conflict between the accountability expected of team leaders and the authority granted them emerged as an important issue. Implications for team leader recruiting, selection, and training are discussed.
Introduction
Although the use of teams has become pervasive in all segments of industry (Manz & Sims, 1993), many team efforts have failed (Lawler, 1986, 1988; Saporito, 1986). Often, team leadership, or lack of it, has been used to explain team failure (Klein, 1984; Letize & Donovan, 1990; Manz & Sims, 1987). The team leader is typically a member of the team who provides guidance and support and has ultimate responsibility for the outcomes of the team. As such, the success of a team leader is often measured in terms of both the cohesiveness of the team as well as producing some tangible outcome. Interestingly, little systematic research has been conducted on the success factors underlying effective team leadership. Although there have been several articles on the topic of team leaders, many of them were anecdotal in nature rather than based on empirical research. Others focused on a narrow portion of team leadership, without considering the broad spectrum of requirements for effective team leaders or have developed broad theoretical frameworks that have yet to be tested in the field. To overcome some of the above deficiencies, the following study analyzes the results of ten focus groups with team leaders and team members across five organizations to determine what is required for effective team leadership.
Research on Leadership
To provide a context in which to understand the literature on team leadership, it is important to acknowledge the literature on leadership in general. There have been four general approaches to studying leadership in the past. Table 1 provides a summary of some of the key contributions of each of the approaches. This summary is intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive. Behavioral/Functional approaches (Blake & Mouton, 1964; Fleishman, 1953; McGrath, 1962; Stogdill, 1974; Yukl, 1998) have discussed leadership in terms...