Adapting to changing situations: the role of leadership styles

Abstract

Nowadays, organizations must deal with changing environments, and one critical aspect of teams to be successful is adaptation (Rosen, Bedwell, Wildman, Fritzsche, Salas, Burke, 2011). Team adaptation is defined as a change in team performance, in response to a salient cue or cue stream, that leads to a functional outcome for the entire team. Team adaptation is manifested in the innovation of new or modification of existing structures, capacities, and/or behavioral or cognitive goal-directed actions (Burke, Stagl, Salas, Pierce & Kendall, 2006). Leadership is seen as one of the main characteristic of groups to be effective (Zaccaro, Rittman & Marks, 2001). Considerable research has shown the important role of leaders behaviors for team performance (Burke, Stagl, Klein, Goodwin, Salas & Halpin, 2006). However, there are many different leadership styles and no consensus has been reached in order to stablish which one is more suited for enhancing and mainting team performance. Extant literature in work team has focused on two main leadership styles representing each of them the counterpart of the other one: directive and empowering. The main objective of this study is to analyze which kind of leadership is more suitable in order to adapt to a change in a task. When facing a change in a task, teams led by directive leaders should experience a lower decrease in their performance given the fact that their behaviors are focused on completing the task. On the other hand, teams led by empowering leaders would focus in processes of information sharing and the decrease in performance should be higher. The study proposed consist in a 2x2 where leadership and magnitude of change are manipulated. Participants in this study included 180 students organized in 603-personteams who engaged in a 3 hour computer simulation task divided into two days inexchange for 10€. In this study we manipulated leadership using a methodology that consisted in selection and training of leaders. A similar methodology has been previoulsy used in other studies (Durham, Knight & Locke, 1997; Lorinkoka, Pearsall & Sims, 2013). The purpose was to maximize the effectiveness of leadership manipulation so that leaders showed the desired behavior. From the restults we expect to conclude which kind of leadership behaviours are better when teams face small and big changes in their tasks. Theoretical and practical implications are both worth the effort because of the lack in knowledge and the increase in the performance of teams in organizations.