Innovation in multidisciplinary teams: The moderating role of transformational leadership in the relationship between professional heterogeneity and shared mental models

Advancing influence tactics to the team level: the case of self-managed teams

Purpose

By combining the influence tactics and team development literatures, this paper aims to propose a new team-level approach to influence tactics in self-managed teams and a temporal account of the extent to which team-level influence tactics are associated with team performance as a dynamic process.

Design/methodology/approach

Using 75 self-managed teams, we examined the relationship between the proportion of team members who tend to use each influence tactic to a high degree and team performance at initial versus advanced stages of team development.

Findings

Results demonstrated at initial stages of team development, a high proportion of team members who tend to use assertiveness was detrimental to team performance, whereas at advanced stages of team development, a high proportion of team members tending to use ingratiation was detrimental, while rationality was positively associated with team performance. Additionally, a Fuzzy Qualitative Comparative Analysis showed that at advanced stages of team development, tactics configuration matters.

Originality/value

This study sets the stage for a team-level theory of influence tactics by examining the relationship between the proportion of team members who tend to use influence tactics to a high degree and team performance at initial versus advanced stages of team development, and the configurations of tactics associated with better team performance at these developmental stages. While the individual-level literature on influence tactics is based on notions of power and politics, in a team context and specifically with self-managed teams, there is a need to integrate theories of team processes and dynamics to understand how influence tactics are associated with performance.

The Relationship Between Preschool Teachers' Proactive Personality and Innovative Behavior: The Chain-Mediated Role of Error Management Climate and Self-Efficacy

Objective: This study, aims to explore the relationship of error management climate and self-efficacy between preschool teachers’ proactive personality and innovative behavior.

Methods: Four hundred thirty-nine preschool teachers were tested by proactive personality scale, error management climate scale, general self-efficacy scale, and employee innovation behavior scale.

Results: Preschool teachers’ proactive personality can directly predict their innovative behaviors, has a significant indirect effect on innovative behaviors through error management climate, and has a significant indirect effect on innovative behaviors through self-efficacy. Error management climate and self-efficacy play a chain-mediated role in the relationship between preschool teachers’ proactive personality and innovative behavior.

Conclusion: Error management climate and self-efficacy play a chain-mediated role in the relationship between preschool teachers’ proactive personality and innovative behavior.

Functional and Visionary Leadership in Self-Managing Virtual Teams

In this conceptual article, we present a theory of leadership in self-managing virtual teams. We describe leadership in this setting as a process that results in the creation, reinforcement, and evolution of shared mental models and shared norms that influence team member behavior toward the successful accomplishment of shared goals. We distinguish two types of leadership. We identify leadership that works within and reinforces existing models and norms to influence team contributions as “functional” leadership. We identify leadership that results in changes in models and norms as “visionary” leadership. We propose that successful self-managing virtual teams require both types of leadership and that they will exhibit a paradoxical combination of shared, distributed functional leadership complemented by strong, concentrated, and centralized visionary leadership and that visionary leadership is enabled by functional leadership in the form of substantive team member contributions.

How and When Do Leaders Influence Employees' Well-Being? Moderated Mediation Models for Job Demands and Resources

Following the call of recent reviews on leadership and well-being, the purpose of this study is to examine how and when two contrasting leadership styles, transformational leadership (TFL) and passive-avoidant leadership (PAL), are related to employees’ anxiety and thereby either promote or inhibit employees’ well-being. Using the prominent job demands-resources (JD-R) model as a theoretical framework, we propose that the relationship between leadership behavior and anxiety is mediated by organizational job demands, namely, role ambiguity (RA), and job resources, namely, team climate for learning (TCL), as well as moderated by autonomy as important job characteristic. A sample of 501 knowledge workers, working in teams in a German research and development (R&D) organization, answered an online survey. We tested moderated multiple mediation models using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results demonstrated that the relationships between TFL as well as PAL on the one hand and anxiety on the other hand were fully mediated by RA and TCL. Job autonomy moderated the quality of the leadership–job demand relationship for TFL and PAL. This paper contributes to understanding the complex relationship between leadership and followers’ well-being taking into account a combination of mediating and moderating job demands and resources. This is the first study that examines the effects of TFL and PAL on well-being taking into account the job demand RA and team processes and autonomy as resources.

How Knowledge Worker Teams Deal Effectively with Task Uncertainty: The Impact of Transformational Leadership and Group Development

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how leadership is able to improve team effectiveness, by means of its influence on group processes (i.e., increasing group development) and on the group task (i.e., decreasing task uncertainty). Four hundred and eight members of 107 teams in a German research and development (R&D) organization completed a web-based survey; they provided measures of transformational leadership, group development, 2 aspects of task uncertainty, task interdependence, and team effectiveness. In 54 of these teams, the leaders answered a web-based survey on team effectiveness. We tested the model with the data from team members, using structural equations modeling. Group development and a task uncertainty measurement that refers to unstable demands from outside the team partially mediate the effect of transformational leadership on team effectiveness in R&D organizations (p < 0.05). Although transformational leaders reduce unclarity of goals (p < 0.05), this seems not to contribute to team effectiveness. The data provided by the leaders was used to assess common source bias, which did not affect the interpretability of the results. Limitations include cross-sectional data and a lower than expected variance of task uncertainty across different job types. This paper contributes to understanding how knowledge worker teams deal effectively with task uncertainty and confirms the importance of group development in this context. This is the first study to examine the effects of transformational leadership and team processes on team effectiveness considering the task characteristics uncertainty and interdependence.

Team Innovation

Team innovation is of growing importance in research in organizational psychology and organizational behavior as well as organizational practice. I review the empirical literature in team innovation to draw integrative conclusions about the state of the science and to provide a research agenda to move the field forward. The review identifies two main perspectives in team innovation research, the knowledge integration perspective and the team climate perspective. Key conclusions focus on the need to integrate these perspectives to develop an integrative contingency model of the factors providing teams with diverse informational resources and the factors influencing the extent to which teams integrate these resources in a process of information exchange and integration. As part of these integrative efforts, construct consolidation efforts are important to reverse the tendency for proliferation of substantially overlapping moderators and mediators proposed. The review also identifies the contingencies of the relationship between idea development and idea implementation as the most important understudied issue in team innovation research.