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Leadership team cohesiveness and team performance

日期:2018年01月15日 编辑: 作者:无忧论文网 点击次数:5452
论文价格:免费 论文编号:lw201002151050032161 论文字数:6000 所属栏目:管理论文
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tegrating the distinctive skills and characteristics of team
members, better performance is expected as compared to individuals working
independently to achieve the same goal (Naquin and Tynan, 2003).
Leadership
When discussing a team, it seems contradictory to also talk about leadership.
If a team is truly working together, where is the place of a leader in such a situation?
Yet, even a team has a dominant person who, for our purposes, can be called a leader
who may very well play a central role in determining group performance. However,
little is known of the impact of this dominant team member. The studies on leadership
have avoided group performance and tended to focus on antecedents and outcomes
related to the individual (see Lim and Ployhart, 2004). In a meta-analysis of leadership
correlates, not a single study with a group measure of performance was included
(Judge et al., 2002). Usually, leadership is studied in the context of criteria such as of
individual characteristics and situational factors each of which may also affect team
performance (e.g., DeShon et al., 2004). Our purpose, here too, is to see if we can develop
a prediction equation consisting of various types of antecedents.
Several taxonomies for categorizing leaders by style have been suggested in the
literature. It would appear that the transactional/transformational leadership theory has
been the focus of most of the recent attention (see, for example, Judge and Bono, 2000).
Especially, with the modern organization and its complexities, this categorization has
allowed investigators to distinguish between meaningful, substantial and practical
techniques. Transactional leadership is associated with contingent reinforcement and
allows the worker freedom to perform as he/she sees fit with the leader intervening when
a problem occurs. Here, the leader and subordinate are involved in a series of exchanges
or bargains so as to assure goal attainment. In contrast, transformational leaders are not
involved in bargaining rather they motivate the worker to achieve transcendental,
longer-lasting goals instead of short-term ones. The latter leader is often viewed as
charismatic, a visionary who provides individual attention and intellectual stimulation.
The advantages of transformational leadership are obvious, especially at the top of the
organizational pyramid, and may be considered as fact as it has been observed across
many studies (Bass, 1990; Conger and Kanungo, 1988).
Although few studies have been done on the relationship between leaders and team
performance, two recent ones do indicate that transformational leadership is effective

for teams. Bass et al. (2003) compared transactional contingent reward and
transformational leadership of infantry unit leaders and found that both active
transactional and transformational leadership are needed to perform successfully. A
passive leader would not be expected to reach desired goals. Also using a military
setting, Dvir et al. (2002) compared an experimental group of leaders trained with
transformational concepts with a control group of leaders provided with eclectic
training. Findings showed that the transformational group had a greater positive
impact on the direct followers’ development and on indirect followers’ performance
than the control group leaders.
In summary, although many argue that leadership effectiveness should be assessed
in terms of team or organizational effectiveness (e.g. Hogan et al., 1994), in reality,
except for a few studies, most investigators evaluate leadership effectiveness in terms
of ratings on individuals provided