Leadership, groups, and task uncertainty

What is it about?

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how leadership is able to improve team effectiveness, by means of its influence on group processes . 408 members of 107 teams in a German research and development organization (R&D) completed a web-based survey on transformational leadership, group development, 2 aspects of task uncertainty, task interdependence, and team effectiveness. In 54 of these teams, the leaders answered a survey on team effectiveness. We analyzed the data using structural equations modelling. Group development and task uncertainty partially mediate the effect of transformational leadership on team effectiveness in R&D organizations. Although transformational leaders reduce unclarity of goals, this seems not to contribute to team effectiveness.

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Why is it important?

Uncertainty is growing in modern working contexts. Knowledge workers are particularly exposed to uncertain tasks and the relevance of knowledge work is rising in the developed economies (Spath and Hofmann, 2009): today’s organizations need to constantly innovate (Reuveni and Vashdi, 2015), and they increasingly rely on teams for this purpose (Edmondson and Nembhard, 2009). Consequently, organizations need to enable their teams to deal with uncertainty and to create the synergies necessary to innovate. Although the literature on leadership is extensive, the role of leadership with respect to the demands of increasingly uncertain tasks has not been investigated, yet. We therefore researched the role of leadership with respect to different types of task uncertainty, taking interpersonal and structural coordination mechanisms into account and addressing limitations of previous research.