Leuteritz Jan-Paul, Navarro José, Berger Rita
Human Factors Engineering, Fraunhofer-Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO)Stuttgart, Germany.
Department of Social Psychology, Universitat de BarcelonaBarcelona, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2017 Aug 15;8:1339. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01339. eCollection 2017.
The purpose of this paper is to clarify how leadership is able to improve team effectiveness, by means of its influence on group processes (i.e., increasing group development) and on the group task (i.e., decreasing task uncertainty). Four hundred and eight members of 107 teams in a German research and development (R&D) organization completed a web-based survey; they provided measures of transformational leadership, group development, 2 aspects of task uncertainty, task interdependence, and team effectiveness. In 54 of these teams, the leaders answered a web-based survey on team effectiveness. We tested the model with the data from team members, using structural equations modeling. Group development and a task uncertainty measurement that refers to unstable demands from outside the team partially mediate the effect of transformational leadership on team effectiveness in R&D organizations ( < 0.05). Although transformational leaders reduce unclarity of goals ( < 0.05), this seems not to contribute to team effectiveness. The data provided by the leaders was used to assess common source bias, which did not affect the interpretability of the results. Limitations include cross-sectional data and a lower than expected variance of task uncertainty across different job types. This paper contributes to understanding how knowledge worker teams deal effectively with task uncertainty and confirms the importance of group development in this context. This is the first study to examine the effects of transformational leadership and team processes on team effectiveness considering the task characteristics uncertainty and interdependence.
本文旨在阐明领导力如何通过对团队过程（即促进团队发展）和团队任务（即降低任务不确定性）的影响来提高团队效能。德国一家研发组织中107个团队的408名成员完成了一项基于网络的调查；他们提供了变革型领导力、团队发展、任务不确定性的两个方面、任务相互依赖性和团队效能的测量数据。在其中54个团队中，领导者回答了一项关于团队效能的网络调查。我们使用结构方程模型，用团队成员的数据对该模型进行了检验。团队发展以及一项涉及团队外部不稳定需求的任务不确定性测量指标，部分中介了变革型领导力对研发组织中团队效能的影响（<0.05）。尽管变革型领导者减少了目标的不明确性（<0.05），但这似乎对团队效能没有贡献。领导者提供的数据用于评估共同来源偏差，其并未影响结果的可解释性。局限性包括横截面数据以及不同工作类型间任务不确定性的方差低于预期。本文有助于理解知识型工作者团队如何有效应对任务不确定性，并证实了在此背景下团队发展的重要性。这是第一项考虑任务特征不确定性和相互依赖性，研究变革型领导力和团队过程对团队效能影响的研究。
