Choose Your Leadership Style
Team leadership style
doesn’t have to be a personality trait; it can be chosen.
Working with an amazing leader is
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – not everyone can work with Nelson Mandela or
Gandhi or even a rock star boss like Bruce Springsteen. Leaders in the knowledge
economy, those who have moved up the ranks from team member to team leader,
aren’t always charismatic. It’s far more commonplace to find team leaders who
were promoted to a leadership role
without developing their leadership skills.
Most work, especially the type
that MBA graduates go on to do, is team-based. Yet working in a team can be
complicated. MBA students often complain about so-called “free riding”, that
is, when some team members don’t put in the work but reap the benefits of
working in a group.
Teams have their own way of
structuring themselves. A major issue is how to structure the work as a team to
get things done by a certain deadline. The challenge for team leaders is how to
manage teams that might be very different from one situation to the next. Teams
often have to come together for short projects and are then disbanded. Others
are constructed or reconstructed depending on the needs of the firm. A team
might be fragmented, clueless and unfamiliar with each other or it could be
experienced and focused with strong ties across team members. Applying the same
leadership style in these different situations, therefore, is likely to be
insufficient.
In our recent paper, “Team Leadership and
Performance: Combining the Roles of Direction and Contribution”, published in Management
Science, Morvarid Rahmani of Georgia Tech, Uday Karmarkar of UCLA Anderson
and I sought to shed light on the idea that leadership types can be chosen
based on the needs of the team, rather than relying on one approach applied in
all situations.
With a model rooted in game
theory, we demonstrate how team leaders can combine their managing and
contributing efforts depending on different factors, such as team size or
project characteristics. Incorporating the team leader’s directing and
contributory efforts, in conjunction with the team members’ contributory
efforts, our model identifies team leadership approaches.
Leadership archetypes
To simplify matters, in our paper
we use traditional leadership archetypes:
Leaders are either directive/autocratic or participatory.
Directive leaders are more likely
to give orders, set meetings, give directions, correct people's work and
generally sit above the team, not with it. Steve Jobs of Apple and Marissa Mayer
of Yahoo! were both known to be directive leaders.
Participatory leaders aren’t as
prescriptive. They work alongside the other team members, doing the same work.
They empower the team and allow its members to freely express themselves.
Nike’s Mark Parker is an example of a participatory leader;
he tries to help his team members hone their ideas.
Questions for team leaders
In a team of peer contributors,
when should the appointed leader exert her rights of leadership, with a
directive style, and when should she be more participatory, contributing as an
equal?
Some have long considered
leadership to be an unconscious personality trait but we argue it needn’t be.
Team leads and other managers can choose different styles depending on the
project, team or timing. They can also blend styles to fit different timelines.
Perhaps a leader is participatory
for a time, then directive, depending on the needs of the team and the project.
If a deadline is long, the team has a lot of slack, so the team members may not
be motivated to put in a lot of effort. In that case, the leader should be more
directive to make sure that the work gets done. In contrast, when the deadline
is very short, the leader can be more participatory because the team members
are naturally more inclined to get things done. A leadership style may thus
change in relation to how close a team is to its deadline.
The role of the leader is to lift
effort in a team when needed. In our model, an important part of leadership is
combatting free riding. If some team members don't exert effort, the leader
should say, "Well, from now on, let's schedule a daily meeting and let's
give reports on what you have accomplished." That focus can counteract the
free-riding effect, because the potential free rider has to show up and
perhaps, due to peer pressure, show that some work has been done.
The nature of work now
The nature of work is evolving to
become more coupled or intertwined with different roles. With knowledge work,
it’s hard to clearly define a person’s individual effort in the end product.
For example, when a team creates software, everyone pitches in with their own
code, plus comments on the code that others produce. The output is the
intertwined effort of the team; it's the product of every individual's
contribution. Everyone needs to participate to complete the team’s project.
Traditional work, on the other hand, is very divisible; a manager could say, "You
work on X and your colleague will work on Y."
One of our findings is that the
degree of coupling only affects the leader’s intensity of directing or
contributing efforts, but it doesn't affect the type of leadership that would
emerge in equilibrium. Whether the work is divisible or tightly coupled, a team
leader may be either participatory or directive, but other factors should be
considered when choosing a leadership style.
Coordination costs of a team
Coupling may not matter to
leadership style, but the size of a team does. The larger the team, the less
effective it will be due to coordination costs. These costs are often
forgotten, but good communication and planning within a larger group does
require more management. With large teams, the belief is the more people there
are, the more creative the team can be, but it also leads to more coordination
costs and free riding.
If a team leader is managing a
whole lab instead of a small team that creates products on a daily or weekly
basis, that leader would clearly want to give defined objectives to the lab
members. Working with a large group of more than 20 lab technicians would be
more like a factory and a traditional, directive leader would help the team’s
effort.
Directive leaders, while looking
out for free riding, need to be respectful of team members. This type of
leadership shouldn’t involve shouting at the team or pointing out errors in an
unpleasant way. It could mean using daily meetings, time sheets or other
measures to make team members feel they are all making the same effort.
The decision
Looking at an analytical model
including the team leader, team members and effort, we found a way to optimise
leadership styles depending on the needs of the team. Our model shows that
there is no single, uniformly good management style; effective leadership
depends on the situation.
Sometimes a team leader will need to roll up her
sleeves and work alongside team members. At other times she will have to assign
specific tasks. Although we often consider the participatory leader best,
remember that sometimes the directive leadership style is what’s best for the
team.
Guillaume Roels, INSEAD Associate Professor of Technology and Operations Management
Read more at https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/choose-your-leadership-style-7971?utm_source=INSEAD+Knowledge&utm_campaign=93e82724ca-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e079141ebb-93e82724ca-249840429#GSwupcTKQ8OEsfO5.99
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