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