Elsevier

The Leadership Quarterly

Volume 27, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 109-123
The Leadership Quarterly

Leading empowered teams: An examination of the role of external team leaders and team coaches

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2015.08.005Get rights and content

Abstract

We examine the influence of two sources of team leadership – formally assigned external team leaders and team coaches, along with organizational and team-based human resource (HR) supports – on team empowerment, processes, and performance. Using survey measures and temporally lagged objective performance indices from 70 service teams and applying structural equation modeling, the results indicate that coaches significantly influence team empowerment, and thereby team processes and performance whereas external team leaders do not. Findings also indicate that HR and organizational supports relate positively to team empowerment and that the effect of coaches on empowerment is beyond the effects of HR and organizational supports, team interdependence, and external team leaders. Directions for future research and application are discussed in terms of using team coaches in addition to traditional leaders for teams adopting new work arrangements.

Section snippets

Theory and hypotheses

Researchers have long recognized that work teams likely have multiple sources of leadership (e.g., McGrath, 1962). Morgeson et al. (2010) adopted a functional view of team leadership (Hackman & Walton, 1986) and emphasized that multiple individuals contribute to fulfilling team needs. They advanced a classification of the sources of team leadership that was anchored along two dimensions, locus of leadership (i.e., internal vs. external) and the formality of leadership (i.e., formal vs.

Participants and setting

Study participants were customer service engineers (CSEs) who repaired and serviced large office document production systems at a multinational office equipment and technology firm. CSEs worked in empowered teams and were responsible for planning, organizing, assigning, and completing their work, as well as making meaningful financial (e.g., repair or replace equipment) and HR decisions (e.g., selecting new members, performance monitoring). Teams were responsible for maintaining and servicing

Results

Table 2 contains correlations and descriptive statistics for all study variables. Notably, both external team-based leadership and coach team-based leadership correlated positively and significantly with team empowerment. We tested our hypotheses using a series of structural equation model tests following procedure outlined by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). We first fit the hypothesized model shown in Fig. 1 to the data. Second, we contrasted the hypothesized model against ones that included the

Discussion

This study constructively replicates and extends the work of Mathieu et al. (2006), who found that external team leaders had no significant impact on team empowerment, processes, or performance when other antecedents were taken into account. Based in part on their findings, the focal organization launched a follow-up intervention that introduced team coaches as an additional, neutral source of external expert leadership in an effort to improve team psychological empowerment, processes, and

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