The Practice of Leadership: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders

Chapter Eight. Best Practices in Team Leadership: What Team Leaders Do to Facilitate Team Effectiveness

Kevin C. StaglEduardo SalasC. Shawn Burke

Team leadership is exalted as one of the most important factors driving the performance and ultimately the success of teams in organizations.^[1] Not surprisingly, the totality of research evidence supports this assertion; team leadership is critical to achieving both affective^[2] and behaviorally based^[3] team outcomes. Team leadership is also a valued outcome of team performance, as witnessed by the additional leadership capacity generated as a team learns from navigating its internal and external challenges.^[4]

This chapter provides a snapshot of the broad functions and specific behaviors team leaders must enact to create the conditions required for team effectiveness. The perspective advanced here suggests that team leaders influence the attainment of important team outcomes by creating five conditions that serve as a set of mutually reinforcing resources that teams draw upon when working toward efficacious performance.^[5] According to Richard Hackman, a social and organizational psychology professor at Harvard University, team leaders can set the stage for team effectiveness by establishing (1) a real team that has (2) a compelling direction, (3) an enabling structure, (4) a supportive context, and (5) access to expert coaching.

Best practice leadership functions and behaviors are advanced as exemplars of what team leaders do to create ...