Human Assets

 

A recent article in Personnel Psychology looked at how leadership behaviours impact on team performance. The research was particularly focused on the leader who emerges from a leaderless team to "exert significant influence over other members of the group although no formal authority has been vested in them". Such a leader emerges when others in the team signal that they expect him or her to be leader. This sets up a virtuous circle, whereby sending the signal encourages the leader to exhibit effective leadership behaviour. In turn, this reinforces the expectation and signalling that they are the leader.

 

 

The authors surmised that there were likely to be certain individual differences that predispose some team members to be seen as effective leaders. Furthermore, specific individual attributes may predispose some individuals to act like a leader. In other words, whilst we may all exhibit leadership behaviour at one time or another, some people are more likely to exhibit behaviour attributed to leadership more often than others.

 

The present research looked at individual differences in leadership in terms of cognitive ability, (as measured by the Wonderlic Personnel Test), and the five-factor model of personality, (as measured by the NEO PI-R). The definitions for a high score on each of the five personality factors are as follows:

 

The authors wanted to investigate whether the performance of the emergent leader had the greater influence on team outcomes, or whether high team performance was more contingent upon the staff also exhibiting leadership behaviour.

 

 

Emerging leaders were rated highly by the team members as exhibiting the following behaviours: assigning tasks; communicating effectively; clarifying work duties and procedures; planning; and facilitating problem solving. These, then, are the leadership behaviours.

 

Thirty-one per cent of the variation in exhibiting leadership behaviour was accounted for by cognitive ability and personality. Cognitive ability contributed the most, followed by Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and lastly, lack of Neuroticism. This is consistent with the findings that people perceive a core set of characteristics related to leadership - these include intelligence, determination, and decisiveness. A high degree of social interaction is required in teamwork and therefore the relationship between Extraversion and leadership was expected.

 

In line with the authors' hypotheses, it was found that high leadership scores on the part of both the team leader and the team members were necessary for achieving high team performance. This suggests that the team leader is a facilitator of team performance rather than being the dominant contributor to team performance.

 

The researchers also found that a low team member leadership score 'neutralised' the effect of the high team leader, indicating that the weakest link, with respect to leadership, significantly impacts on team performance. In other words, each team member makes a unique contribution to team effectiveness, and the failure of one member to exhibit leadership behaviour is detrimental to team performance.

 

 

The leader provides a resource to the group by facilitating leadership functions, e.g. directing the task. Where the emerged team leader may set goals and allocate responsibilities on the larger task, team members may engage in similar behaviour on sub-tasks. Therefore, whilst the main purpose of leadership is to organise and direct the group toward the attainment of mutual goals, it appears that a team performs best when such behaviour is the responsibility of staff members as well as the team leader.

 

Human resource practitioners should, therefore, seek to maximise the number of people in a team who exhibit leadership behaviour. This means that recruitment processes should assess candidates on their leadership skills, and management development programmes should be tailored to training individuals in leadership behaviour.

 

 

Tagger, S., Hackett, R., and Saha, S. (1999) Leadership emergence in autonomous work teams: antecedents and outcomes. Personnel Psychology, 52, 899-924. 

 

Newsletter: 2003