TEAM DYNAMICS

Module 3
• Module III – Team Leadership
• Leadership qualities; Changing landscape of leading teams; Transition and Action phase leadership function;
Challenges of team leadership; 3D team leadership – Individual, Team, Subteam; Leading and motivating
team members; Individual and team empowerment; Team leadership across culture; Leadership in virtual
teams (9 Hours)
Leadership Qualities
• Leadership
• Leadership Styles
• Qualities
Changing landscape of leading teams
Transition and Action phase leadership function

• Transition phases are those periods of time during which the team focuses primarily on
structuring the team, planning the team’s work, and evaluating the team’s performance. In
contrast, action phases are those periods of time when the team is engaged in work that
directly contributes to task accomplishment.
Challenges of team leadership

• Embracing individual differences while simultaneously emphasizing team identity and goals.
• Encouraging team members to support one another while simultaneously creating conditions under
which members can confront one another and have healthy levels of functional team conflict.
• Focusing on successful performance while simultaneously creating learning experiences that
come from making mistakes and failing.
• Balancing leader authority with team member discretion and authority.
The New Tensions of Team Leadership for Today’s Teams

• Simultaneously balancing team leadership roles and responsibilities in some teams, with
team membership roles and responsibilities in other teams.
• Balancing the need for belongingness associated with face- to- face teamwork against the
requirements for efficient teamwork associated with more technology- based, virtual
approaches.
• To leverage newcomers’ fresh perspectives with the pressure to get them quickly
acclimated to an existing status quo.
Major pitfalls that severely limit a team’s potential to be effective.
• Both leaders and companies promote an entirely “there is no ‘I’ in teams” ideology.
• Many companies create teams. However, these “teams” stagnate or, even worse, disintegrate in ways
that cost organizations months of lost time and thousands of dollars.
• Tendency to overlook the relationships between smaller subsets of members.

• Why do we see leaders stumble into the three pitfalls so frequently even when they seem fairly obvious on
the surface? What’s the solution?
3D Team Leadership
• A Team Is Not One Thing; It’s Actually Three Things.
• In an effort to clarify the benefits of teaming and help managers understand their new team
leadership roles better, Hirschhorn conceived of a triangle of relationships inherent in all
teams.
• Sitting at the three points of the triangle were
(1)the leader of a team,
(2)an entire team itself, and
(3)various individuals on the team.
3D team leadership – Individual, Team, Subteam

• The “I’s” in Teams

• Individuals in the team.
• When members become fearful of being accused of not being a team player, they often
shut down, withhold valuable dissenting opinions, and easily agree to potentially
devastating false consensus in critical decisions
• A Team as a Whole
• Set team goals, establish strategic frameworks to guide their team’s decision making,
implement team bonuses, or design and monitor the amount of interdependence
members use to complete tasks.
• Subteams
• Subteams are the smaller sets of team members contained within an overall team. These
groupings often occur naturally through social identity processes and can serve as a key
way for members to make sense of the team context.
Leading and motivating team members

• Intrinsic motivation — motivation that comes from within individuals. It is driven primarily
by an individual’s interest in or passion for the work itself and therefore is not based on
drivers outside the person, like money or a promotion.
• Extrinsic motivation consists of motivation that comes from outside an individual. Such
motivators could include things like pay raises or bonuses, opportunities for promotion,
competition, external praise, and even negative sources like fear of punishment or criticism
from others.
Leading and motivating team members

• Focus more on intrinsic than extrinsic techniques due to their longerlasting and generally
more powerful effects on performance.
• for several reasons:
• employees today are expressing a strong desire for meaningfulness in their work.
• you may not always have the formal power to change extrinsic reward systems easily.
• teams often move through different tasks and life cycles so fast that trying to change extrinsic reward systems
quickly enough is impractical, if not impossible.
Empowerment Really Is the Gold Standard of Individual Intrinsic Motivation
• Empowerment - transfer power from leaders to those around them.
• This definition suggests that a leader loses power so that other individuals may gain it.
• There are two problems with this view. First, the definition is overly narrow. As you will see, the term means a great deal more
than one person giving another more power. Second, this definition also assumes that empowerment is a zero- sum game or
some sort of fixed pie: if you give someone else more power, by definition, you must lose power.
• However, the evidence shows just the opposite: by empowering others to tackle more ambitious challenges, you will be freed up
to take on more of the actual leadership responsibilities of your role rather than doing others’ work for them. In other words,
giving up some power can, paradoxically, make you more powerful than you ever thought possible.
• empowerment implies that people have perceptions and judgments about the tasks they perform and the work they do. These
judgments, in turn, determine how intrinsically motivated they feel.
• Importantly, people make judgments about four distinct aspects of their work:
• How much choice they have over what they do
• The degree of impact their work has on others around them and their company
• The level of competence they experience when performing their tasks
• The extent to which they feel a sense of meaningfulness when working
Dimensions of Individual empowerment
• Choice - extent to which people have self- determination or control over carrying out their work.
• Impact - the extent to which a person’s work is perceived as making a difference in a company. People
typically want to feel that what they do matters at work. The key here, then, is feedback: people need
clear information on their work’s level of impact within a company.
• Competence - the extent to which people can carry out their work skillfully when they attempt to do
so.
• Meaningfulness - the extent to which people care, on an intrinsic level, about the work they do. When
people are performing activities that are meaningful to them, they exhibit many visible clues.
Everything from their facial expressions, body language, the excitement with which they talk about
their ideas, and their interactions with others communicates meaning. When people do intrinsically
meaningful work, they typically do not need any other source of motivation.
Leading and Motivating a Team as a Whole
• Empowerment Is Not Just for Individuals; It Works for Teams Too
• team empowerment also improves both an entire team’s performance and its internal team processes
(such as communication and decision making), yielding a kind of two- for- one effect in companies.
• team members have collective perceptions and beliefs about their overall team tasks, which in turn
determine how intrinsically motivated team members feel as a team. Importantly, these perceptions
have to be shared by all team members (or at least a majority) for team empowerment to truly exist.
After all, if there are no shared beliefs about team empowerment (i.e., everyone in a team sees it
differently), then all you probably have is individual empowerment and no real sense of team
empowerment.
• Team members make collective judgments about four distinct aspects of their team’s work:
• how much autonomy an overall team has
• the degree of impact an entire team’s work has on others (e.g., individuals, other teams, a company,
clients)
• the level of potency members experience when performing team tasks
• the extent to which team members feel a sense of meaningfulness when carrying out team tasks.
• Autonomy - Team autonomy is the degree to which a team’s members collectively believe they have a sense of
freedom in carrying out their tasks or making a team decision. The key difference is that with team autonomy, a
team’s members have to share the amount of decision- making latitude in their work with one another
• Impact - the extent to which a team produces work that is significant and important for a company. Members of
most teams want to believe that their work is worthwhile and that it has substantial benefit to stakeholders both
inside and outside their company.
• Potency - the collective belief of members in a team that it can be effective. When a team’s members feel a collective
sense of potency, they believe that nothing can stop the team from being successful.
• Meaningfulness - the degree to which a team deems its tasks as important, valuable, and worthwhile. Like impact,
meaningfulness is the generally recognized term for both individual and team empowerment. The fact remains that
when team members experience a collective sense of meaningfulness in their work, they are likely to get so
wrapped up in what they are doing that they lose sense of time or forget how hard they are working
Do Individual and Team Empowerment Coexist Peacefully, or Do
They Work against Each Other?
 Team leadership across culture

• It is important to recognize key cultural differences between the countries and be flexible and adaptable enough to
alter the behavior and approaches when moving across cultures.
• Hofstede’s cultural dimensions
• “Do people prefer to work primarily alone (individualism) or in groups/teams (collectivism)?”
• “How important are status and hierarchy in terms of getting things done in organizations (power distance)?”,
• “How much tolerance do people have for ambiguity in their work (uncertainty avoidance)?”
• “Do people put more emphasis on assertiveness, achievement, and competition (quantity of life or
masculinity) or taking care of others and societal welfare (quality of life or femininity)?”
• Long-term versus short-term orientation, deals with people’s values regarding respect for tradition, a focus
on the past, and respect for social obligations versus adaptation of traditions to a modern context, a focus on the
future, and more limited respect for social obligations.
• Indulgence versus restraint, refers to whether people in a society are relatively free to gratify basic and
natural human drives connected to enjoying life and having fun or instead suppress gratifying needs and
regulate life using strict social norms.
Using the 3D Team Leadership Model in Different Countries
Virtual teams
• Ideally, virtual teams allow organizations to leverage boots-on-the-ground views from all over the
world and get collaboration from the best employees regardless of their location. Yet virtual teams
introduce several additional and unique challenges beyond the cultural considerations described in the
previous chapter that leaders must overcome.
• Virtual teams still face several common obstacles that limit their effectiveness.
• Virtual team members are typically less familiar with one another than traditional face-to-face team members;
they may have never actually met in person or, at best, met only once or twice. These challenges create serious
relationship-based pressures for leaders even before the task-related challenges begin.
• Time zone differences. Most companies rely on audio-or videoconference calls during working hours at
headquarters and over time observed that team members in the other locations were resentful for having to be
on calls at all hours of the night and early morning.
• Failing to work in a true interdependent fashion- Due to scheduling challenges like time zone differences, a lack
of rich communication and deep personal relationships, and varying work cultures, virtual team members often
find it simpler just to break overall team tasks down into individual or same-location subteam assignments.
Then, right before their next scheduled meeting, members or subteams will hastily compile their work into a
single (and often incoherent) final output.
Leadership in Virtual Teams

• Be proactive, organized, and able to make trade-offs (time, cost, scope).

• Have the skill to select the right mix of people.
• Be flexible, understand different cultures, and overcome language barriers and misunderstandings.
• Meet deadlines, set expectations for team members, conduct resource and budget planning, and develop new talent,
all of which require special skills in influencing without power, listening, relationship building, delegation, and
control.
• Motivate others, maintain a positive attitude, and resolve conflicts fairly.
• Build a special relationship with each member, share rewards and credit with team members, and engage in small
acts of kindness with team members.
• Be realistic about time lines, make priorities clear to everyone, and have a high level of technical expertise.
• Be able to identify strong leads in host countries, and get the right skill set on the team.
• Work with stakeholders and keep them informed (relationship management).
• Be a good knowledge-sharing role model