۱- Introduction

۲- Leadership from a network perspective

۳- Schemas and scripts

۴- Implicit leadership and followership theories

۵- Implicit leadership network theories (ILNTs)

۶- Exemplar team-level ILNT configurations

۷- Team characteristics and ILNTs

۸- Theoretical implications

۹- Human resource management implications

۱۰- Conclusion

References

Abstract

Leadership in today’s high-performing teams is a relational process best understood from a multilevel emergent perspective. Implicit theories of leadership and followership play an important role in predicting leader emergence in more traditional hierarchical structures, but are inadequate for understanding and predicting leadership as networks in teams, as they do not consider the complex dynamics of leading and following activities inherent in such structures. To address this theoretical gap, we propose the concept of Implicit Leadership Network Theories (ILNTs) that integrates implicit leadership and followership theories with contemporary social network perspectives of leadership in teams to predict the shape and structure of leadership network emergence and subsequent team outcomes. More specifically, we propose that the combination of team member self-ILNTs (i.e., expectations regarding one’s own role within a leadership network) and network-ILNTs (i.e., expectations regarding the prototypical team leadership structure) will shape the emergence and effectiveness of leadership in teams. We describe several prototypical team configurations of ILNTs and discuss implications for future research and human resource management.

Introduction

Huge shifts in cultural expectations and organizational structure have swept global enterprises, and today the majority of work is performed in teams. Reports suggest that upwards of 80% of companies with over 100 employees rely on teams to complete everyday work and solve complex problems (Cohen & Bailey, 1997; Peterson, Mitchell, Thompson, & Burr, 2000), and successful team performance has become a key driver of organizational success (Ernst & Young, 2013). Thus, optimizing team performance has become an imperative for organizations. Effective team leadership is one of the most influential factors in developing high-performance teams (Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008). However, over the past decade, both organizations and researchers have begun to move away from viewing leadership in terms of traditional hierarchical formal roles. Organizations today are deconstructing these outdated models of leadership, and are being reinvented to operate as flatter networks of teams cooperating to keep pace with unpredictable, fluid challenges (McDowell, Agarwal, Miller, Okamoto, & Page, 2016). Today, organizations are concerned with building the social capital (i.e., connections and interactions among individuals) and overall leadership capacity of our workforces more than ever (Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm, & McKee, 2014). To fully realize the benefits of building the leadership capacity, organizations must expand beyond the constraining focus on single, formal leaders and high potentials, whose span of influence will be limited.