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Team Leadership

Team leadership reflects a process by which one or more individuals direct, structure, and facilitate the collective efforts of team members to achieve team effectiveness. According to J. Richard Hackman and his colleagues in 1986 and 2002, team effectiveness is characterized by the quantity, quality, and timeliness of the team's work output (i.e., product, service, decision), the enhancement of members' capability to work together independently in the future, and the learning and personal well-being of individual team members. It is the role, therefore, of the team leader(s) to create conditions and act in a way that advances the teams' productive output; the viability of the team as a whole; and the knowledge, skills, and other relevant attributes of the individual members.

Conceptual Overview

Team Versus Individual Leadership

What makes leading teams special or unique as compared to leading individuals? In addition to the technical and social aspects that individual leadership entails, team leaders must also facilitate the interaction and coordination among team members to produce collective output. Thus, an effective team leader must focus on facilitating and monitoring member taskoriented behaviors, as well as fostering team-centered integration. For example, a coach or a team captain has the responsibility both to help football team members be proficient in their individual roles (e.g., blocking, running, catching) and to facilitate the entire team to coordinate the accomplishments of different member roles. Team leadership is successful when the individual efforts come together and, through the better interconnectivity, integration, and coherence facilitated by team leaders, achieve a synergy beyond the mere sum of individual member capabilities.

Team leadership also involves developing other team members and empowering them to lead themselves. When internal team leadership functions are increasingly shared, the designated leader can devote more resources to issues and problems beyond the team's boundary and help the team respond more adaptively to its larger environment. This means that the roles and team-facilitative actions of the leader change as the team matures, a point that will be covered in more detail later in this entry.

Team Leadership Functions

The primary function of team leaders is to foster team processes that result in group effectiveness (i.e., productive output, team growth, and individual learning). Hackman and his colleagues have identified several major conditions that effective team leaders should implement to increase the chances that a team will be effective. First, a team needs to have a clearly defined, interdependent task; clear team boundaries or clear specification of who belongs within the team; clear authority to manage team members' own work; and a relatively stable membership. Second, a leader needs to establish an unambiguous direction for the team's work. This direction should be formative enough to guide team members' actions as well as to energize them to devote the required talent and effort to collective action. Third, team leaders are responsible for creating a team structure and performance strategy that enable the team to be successful. Such responsibility includes composing a team with the right number of individuals who contain the appropriate mix of knowledge, skills, abilities, and personalities, as well as the interpersonal capacities to interact appropriately in a team setting. A successful group structure also includes a work design that enhances motivation and group norms that prompt appropriate member behavior. Fourth, effective team leaders strive to comprehend and manage the external environment, working to create the most suitable context for group effectiveness. The team should have access to the resources (e.g., time, money, information, equipment) necessary for team functioning and task accomplishment. The external environment should also support teams by giving them the opportunity to develop technical and teamwork skills as well as reinforce excellence, such that teams are rewarded for successful performance. Fifth, and last, an effective team leader should serve as an expert coach, interacting directly with team members to motivate, consult, and teach at the particular times when team members will benefit most from these actions.

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