When Do Team Members Share the Lead? A Social Network Analysis.

Shared leadership is not only about individual team members engaging in leadership, but also about team members adopting the complementary follower role. However, the question of what enables team members to fill in each of these roles and the corresponding influence of formal leaders have remained largely unexplored. Using a social network perspective allows us to predict both leadership and followership ties between team members based on considerations of implicit leadership and followership theories. From this social information processing perspective, we identify individual team members' political skill and the formal leaders' empowering leadership as important qualities that facilitate the adoption of each the leader and the follower role. Results from a social network analysis in a R&D department with 305 realized leadership ties support most of our hypotheses.

Transformational leadership and team innovation: integrating team climate principles.

Fostering team innovation is increasingly an important leadership function. However, the empirical evidence for the role of transformational leadership in engendering team innovation is scarce and mixed. To address this issue, the authors link transformational leadership theory to principles of M. A. West's (1990) team climate theory and propose an integrated model for the relationship between transformational leadership and team innovation. This model involves support for innovation as a mediating process and climate for excellence as a moderator. Results from a study of 33 research and development teams confirmed that transformational leadership works through support for innovation, which in turn interacts with climate for excellence such that support for innovation enhances team innovation only when climate for excellence is high.

The impact of charismatic leadership on followers' initiative-oriented behavior: a study in German hospitals.

BACKGROUND: Organizations in the health care sector are undergoing extensive structural reforms. To face these challenges, management initiatives that foster employees' commitment to and support for organizational change are needed in hospitals. PURPOSES: In literature, a charismatic leadership style has proved to be especially helpful in times of crisis and change as well as an essential antecedent of followers' discretionary behavior in organizations. Thus, the aim of the study was to investigate charismatic leadership as a means to enhance followers' initiative-oriented behavior in hospitals. In the hospital context, two situational conditions have to be taken into account. We hypothesized that both employees' job autonomy and stress in the workplace will moderate the positive relationship between charismatic leadership and followers' initiative-oriented behavior. METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: We investigated 543 members of medical staff (physicians and nurses) in six German hospitals by using a questionnaire. The hypotheses were tested by conducting hierarchical regression analyses and interpreting main effects and interactions effects. FINDINGS: Charismatic leadership significantly predicted followers' initiative-oriented behavior. Moreover, our study confirmed the moderating effect of job autonomy. However, the moderating effect of followers' stress was not confirmed by our data. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: First, the results of our investigation point at the positive impact that charismatic leaders have on followers' initiative-oriented behavior in the hospital. Several studies have shown that training can improve leaders' abilities in charismatic leadership. Thus, a suggestion for supervisor development from this is not only to provide professional training but also to intensify efforts in training specialized on charismatic leadership. Second, to support followers' participation in change processes, hospital managers should consider if and how the degree of followers' job autonomy can be enhanced.