|
Leadership Report
What Makes an Effective Team Leader
[ April 2004 ]
Getting commitment to a project or team is an essential part of effective leadership, and more so all the time. Some new research sheds light on this issue, and inspired us to clarify how our method helps this happen.
In this report:
Why People Commit to a Team--Or Don't
An article on intergroup conflict in the latest issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review by Gary Bronstein of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem offers a new slant on why some teams are effective at working together and others are not. Bernstein's review of the research confirmed many of the ideas that we have been bringing into the workplace recently.
Being in a corporation, or being a member of a team in a unit within a large company, is rather like a gambler with a stack of chips in front of him. The job of the team leader is to persuade members that it is in their interest to commit those chips to the team effort--rather, as Bronstein says, like a general has to persuade his troops that it is in their interest to risk their lives in battle.
Corporate team players have three kinds of chips, relating to self-esteem, time and effort. The team members will commit or withhold their chips according to whether they perceive that committing to the team will meet their own needs or is in the broader social interest.
We would say that the personal needs of the team members come, broadly, under four headings and that they will ask themselves a number of questions pertaining to each of these areas:
Physical safety
"Will the job last?"
"Will being a member of the team give me good career experience?"
"Will the success of the team effort give me greater job security?"
Emotional security
"Can I trust the corporation or the people I will be working with?"
"Do I like the people I will be working with?"
"Will the people I will be working with support me emotionally?"
Attention
"Will I be treated with respect?"
"Will the success of the team increase my sense of self-esteem?"
"Will I feel proud of working with the team?"
Importance
"Will my ideas be taken seriously?"
"Will I have a significant say in the decision-making process?"
"Will I be supported in my work?"
Depending on the answers to these questions the team members will commit
or withdraw their chips.
Bornstein points out that, contrary to popular belief, people will not work harder to try to make a team effort succeed if they perceive that it is failing. Rather, like an army on the verge of defeat, they desert, they take their chips off the table. This leads to conflict within the team between those who think the effort is worthwhile and still have their chips on the table and those who don't. Those whose chips are still in play will become increasingly unwilling to negotiate or compromise, which will lead to a further withdrawal of time, self-esteem and effort by the remainder.
The job of the team leader, or, in our case the trainer, is to get the whole team to agree to the goals of the team--including an overall social goal. The next thing is to work out the individual needs of the team members under the four headings. These will have to be met for them to feel that committing their chips is a good idea. Once this is done the members can work together effectively with far less conflict, bullying and anxiety.
Read more in the Personality and Social Psychology Review
Top of page
Importance Ranks Higher than Money
First, it's clear that money is not the big motivator you might have thought. Research by a group of economists and psychology researchers at the University of Warwick reveals that our rank within an organization has a bigger effect on our happiness and sense of accomplishment than the size of our paycheck by a factor of 50 to 60%.
The researchers, led by economists Professor Andrew Oswald and Dr Jonathan Gardner, studied data from 16,266 individuals from 886 separate workplaces, and also carried out two further psychological experiments. They presented their findings recently to a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The results from the analysis of happiness, pay and rank data from the 16,266 individuals found that the level of actual pay, or the average level of pay in an organization, had very little effect on how happy people were with the level of respect they had within that organization. It also had little effect on how happy people were with their achievements within that organization.
One lesson from this is to find out from people who work for you what makes them feel important, and what you could do to make them feel even more so. Remember, never assume you know what someone wants--find ways to ask!
Read more on the University of Warwick website
Top of page
Emails May Do More Harm Than Good
Millennia of evolution have made face-to-face communication Man's preferred method, says Dr Ned Kock, director of the E-Collaboration Research Center in Temple University's Fox School of Business and Management.
"There is a principle from evolution theory called the 'repeated use principle,' which argues that we have to repeatedly use a medium of communication, an organ, or a task so that our biological apparatus becomes optimized to use that tool or perform that task," says Kock. "Since we have communicated during most of the past three to five million years by using face-to-face interaction, you have to conclude that we have optimized our biological apparatus for that type of communication."
Kock argues that a lot of today's electronic communications takes us too far away from face-to-face communication, and requires increased cognitive effort on our part. "For example, a telephone allows us to use tone of voice," says Kock. "It's synchronous, so we have immediate feedback on what we say." But, Kock points out, since the telephone doesn't allow one person to see the other, a bit more cognitive effort is required when communicating over the telephone, as opposed to face-to-face.
"Now, if we go to e-mail, there's considerably more cognitive effort required than over the telephone," he says.
Kock did a study in which he compared twenty groups performing complex tasks--ten groups interacting by face-to-face, and the other ten via e-mail. The study indicates that the amount of time cognitive effort (measured as "time") required to convey a certain number of ideas via email is between 5 and 15 times than required to convey the same ideas in a face-to-face conversation. "In a typical conversation, we exchange hundreds, maybe thousands, of words. If you measure the time it takes for that conversation to take place, and then try to have the same conversation over e-mail and measure the time that takes, you would get a time that is considerably higher than the face-to-face conversation," he says.
In recognition of this problem, Koch says, some successful online companies like LivePerson.com are developing technologies that give a company's online customers the impression that they're dealing with a live person over the Web.
Still, nothing beats simply walking down the corridor and stepping into someone's office for a face-to-face. In fact, given the email blizzard we all face, taking the time to see someone or even to pick up the phone sends a very strong meta-message that you feel that person is important to you. Even a hand-written note is a courtesy that stands out.
Emails aren't just taxing, they drain profits. Separate research has shown that intra-company emailing can lower productivity by almost 30%. We've noticed that email actually triggers anger and that people seem to be less inhibited about venting their aggro by email, and that's becoming a real problem in a number of organizations. In one organization, management had to screen company directors' emails for abusive content.
Read more on the Temple University website
Top of page
Womens' Transformational Leadership Style More Effective
Women are especially talented in getting commitment from those they lead because of the leadership styles they favor, according to a comprehensive meta-analysis just published in the Psychological Bulletin. This project, "Transformational, Transactional and Laissez Faire Leadership Styles: A Meta-Analysis Comparing Women and Men," statistically combines the results of 45 published and unpublished studies on leaders in business, academics and other areas to examine whether the typical leadership styles of men and women differ.
The meta-analysis showed that women are more likely than men to use leadership styles that other studies have shown produce better worker performance and effectiveness in today's world. Specifically, women were more likely to be transformational leaders, defined as those who serve as role models, mentor and empower workers and encourage innovation even when the organization they lead is generally successful.
Eagly's meta-analysis grows out of a substantial body of research that attempts to identify leadership styles that are especially attuned to contemporary conditions. Gaining momentum in the 1990s, that research showed that transformational leadership strengthens organizations by inspiring followers' commitment and creativity.
Leadership researchers found that, in contrast, "transactional" leaders appeal to subordinates' self-interest by forming exchange relationships, based on using reward and punishment as incentives. The researchers also distinguished a laissez faire style that is marked by an overall failure to take responsibility for managing. In Eagly's study, women also scored higher than men on one measure of transactional leadership--rewarding employees for good performance. "That is the only aspect of transactional leadership that is associated with positive outcomes," Eagly noted.
Men scored higher than women on the other transactional aspects, such as using punishment, and on laissez faire leadership--behaviors that do not appear to produce more effective organizations. "Giving women equal access to leadership roles obviously would increase the size of an organization's pool of potential managers," Eagly said. "What people may not realize is that adding women to that pool likely increases the proportion of candidates with superior leadership skills."
Women may be forced to be more skillful managers than their male counterparts because of the much-touted glass ceiling, which requires them to meet a higher standard. Still, the secret that enables them to do so is their transformational style--which is becoming the hallmark of good leadership.
Read more on the Psychological Bulletin
More Leadership Reports | Join our Newsletters
Top of page
|
