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Who’s in Charge Here? The Team Leadership Implications of Authority Structure

Ruth Wageman

Harvard University

Colin Fisher

Boston University

ABSTRACT

Although team leadership can be enacted in many ways, a team’s formal authority structure

shapes how key leadership functions are fulfilled and by whom. In this chapter, we analyze how

specific team leadership challenges and opportunities emerge from whether the team itself or

managers hold legitimate authority for four critical team functions (Hackman, 2002): (a)

executing the team task, (b) monitoring and managing work processes, (c) designing the team

and its context, and (d) setting overall direction for the team. We then use the four resultant team

authority structures (i.e. manager-led, self-managing, self-designing, self-governing) to

synthesize relevant research, draw implications for the practice of team leadership, and identify

directions for future research. We hope this chapter gives practitioners and scholars a way to

explore the characteristics of a particular situation that suggest a particular authority structure,

and the ways in which members and formal leaders may effectively operate within that structure.

Keywords: team leadership, authority, functional leadership, self-managing teams, self-

governing teams, self-designing teams, manager-led teams

Cite as: Wageman, R. & Fisher, C.M. (in press). Who’s in charge here? The team leadership

implications of authority structure. In D. Day (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Leadership and Organizations. Oxford University Press: Oxford, U.K.

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While teams accomplish much of the work in modern organizations (Hills, 2007; Kozlowski

& Bell, 2003; Lawler, Mohrman, & Ledford, 1995), the meaning of team leadership remains

elusive. Two factors contribute to this ambiguity. First, team leadership encompasses a wide

variety of activities – it can mean everything from deciding to form a team in the first place, to

composing the team, to exhorting members to exert more effort (Burke et al., 2006; Fleishman et

al., 1991; Hackman & Walton, 1986; Morgeson et al., 2010; Zaccaro, Rittman, & Marks, 2001).

Second, team leadership can be enacted by multiple people; indeed, it would be a tall order for

any one individual to provide all the leadership necessary for a well-functioning team. Because

team leadership involves a wide variety of behaviors enacted by multiple people, many scholars

and practitioners have embraced a functional view of team leadership (Ginnett, 1993; Morgeson,

DeRue, & Karam, 2010; Wageman & Hackman 2009). In the functional view, team leadership is

defined as “to do, or get done, whatever is not being adequately handled for group needs”

(McGrath, 1962, p. 5).

Therefore, one critical implication of the functional view is that asking if someone is “team

leader” is less helpful than asking who fulfills critical team leadership functions. Leadership

functions can be fulfilled by a designated leader with formal authority, but also by team

members themselves, or by external coaches with no formal authority over the team. The

functional perspective therefore takes as given that team leadership is almost invariably shared

leadership (Pearce & Conger, 2003). In other words, anyone can exercise team leadership, and a

wide range of activities aimed at creating the conditions for team effectiveness count as acts of

leadership. In the functional view, therefore, team design choices such as determining team

membership, articulating team purposes clearly, designing team tasks, and establishing its reward

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structure all count as acts of team leadership because they are necessary for a group to

accomplish its purposes. Indeed, significant research evidence exists to support the view that

such design choices are among the most important acts of team leadership because they account

for so much of the variance in team effectiveness (Hackman & O’Connor, 2004; Wageman,

2001).

Nonetheless, there are differences in who fulfills critical team leadership functions in

different contexts, and these differences are strongly driven by the authority structure within

which teams operate (Pearce & Conger, 2003). While front-line team managers typically have

the authority to clarify team objectives and to offer hands-on coaching (Zaccaro et al., 2001), for

example, they often lack the authority within their organizations to establish the teams’ purposes

and structures, or to alter contextual conditions to support a team’s work (Manz, 1992). Those

organization-wide elements may lie within the authority of much more senior managers, and may

be designed for reasons having little to do with the impact on front-line teams. Leadership

functions, in such contexts, are shared among different groups of managers. While, in theory,

anyone can exercise leadership for a team, in fact the authority structure in a given context places

expectations and constraints on who may legitimately fulfill key leadership functions. Therefore,

the location of the authority to alter a team's design features and to manage its work processes is

a key determinant both of who fulfills critical team leadership functions, the degree to which

those are shared, and whether and how well they are fulfilled (Mannix & Sauer, 2006).

Hackman (2002) proposed four key team functions for which teams themselves or external

managers of the teams may have authority. These are: (a) executing the team task, (b)

monitoring and managing work processes, (c) designing the team (e.g., choosing members) and

its context (e.g., its information system), and (d) setting overall direction for the team.

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[insert Figure 1 about here]

Teams can be classified into distinct types depending on whether it is the team itself or

managers who hold legitimate authority for these critical team functions. As shown in Figure 1,

teams that have authority only for the completion of their own tasks are classified as manager-

led (because all authority to exercise leadership belongs to managers); those that can monitor and

manage their own work processes are self-managing; teams that also have authority to compose

the team and shape their own context are termed self-designing; those that have authority over all

four functions, including the authority to determine their own purposes, are classified as self-

governing.

In this chapter, we use this classification to explore how each type of team authority structure

presents different team leadership challenges and opportunities. We summarize and synthesize

research relevant to each of these authority structures, draw implications for the practice of team

leadership, and identify areas where relatively little is known, offering directions for the future of

research. Given several excellent reviews of group processes and functioning in recent years

(i.e. Ilgen, et al., 2005; Larson, 2011; Morgeson, et al, 2010; Straus, Parker, & Bruce, 2011;

Zaccaro, et al., 2001), we do not review research that focuses primarily on the relationships

between specific internal group processes and emergent states (e.g. conflict as a driver of

information sharing within a team) and place our focus on research on the influence of team

leadership functions on key team processes and outcomes.

Leadership of Manager-led Teams

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Many scholars and practitioners think of team leadership in terms of an individual team

leader vested with formal authority (Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2006; Hackman, 2002). While it is

true that many teams have designated individual leaders, not all teams with a formal team leader

should be considered “manager-led.” Instead, we define manager-led teams as teams in which

members “have authority only for actually executing the task…in such teams, managers manage,

workers work, and the two functions are kept as separate as possible” (Hackman, 2002).

Manager-led teams are ubiquitous in contexts such as orchestras, surgical teams, airline cockpit

crews, assembly line manufacturing, and sports teams. For instance, in cardiac surgery teams,

leadership is generally “hierarchical, demanding, and direct” (Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano,

2003, p. 704); many surgeons lead the teams by controlling even who speaks during surgery. As

one perfusionist said:

Once when we were having trouble with the venous return, and I mentioned it, the

surgeon said, ‘Jack, is that you?’ I said yes. He said, "Are you pumping [being the first

rather than second, or assisting, perfusionist] this case?" I said, "No I'm assisting." "Well

in the future, if you are not pumping the case, I don't want to hear from you." You see it's

a very structured communication. (Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2003; p. 704).

This kind of tight control of the group process is common in surgery and the medical profession

more generally (Nembhardt & Edmonson, 2006). In fact, many surgeons view the team as mere

support systems for them as individuals. As one cardiac surgeon said, “Once I get the team set

up, I never look up [from the operating field]…it’s they who have to make sure that everything is

flowing” (Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2001, p. 128).

Professional symphony orchestra conductors also tend to tightly control and supervise the

process of their work groups (Allmendinger, Hackman, & Lehman, 2006). Like surgeons,

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conductors often experience the work of their team as a mere vehicle for their individual work.

Composer/conductor Eberhard Weber described his experience, saying, “I like to create the

music I hear in my interior. As a conductor, you have the ability to squeeze the sounds and

interpretation you asked for from 50 to 80 people” (Weber, n.d.). Former Boston Sympony

Orchestra music director Charles Munsch echoed this view, saying, “The conductor must breathe

life into the score. It is you and you alone who must expose it to the understanding, reveal the

hidden jewel to the sun at the most flattering angles” (Munsch, 1955).

As the examples above show, manager-led teams exist in contexts in which individual

team leaders are expected to exert a great deal of control. While a manager-led structure

provides unique opportunities for teams to accomplish certain types of work, this structure also

produces some well-evidenced challenges. In the following section, we review these

opportunities and challenges. Based on this analysis, we suggest imperatives for leaders of

manager-led teams and directions for future research.

Opportunities for Manager-led Teams

As one might imagine, opportunities for manager-led teams generally require a highly

competent leader. An incompetent leader with control over team design and work processes can

easily undermine a team (Wageman, 2001). In contrast, a superb team leader can help develop

and improve even the most competent of performing units. Assuming the leader is qualified, we

propose two primary opportunities in implementing and maintaining a manager-led authority

structure in teams: (a) bridging an expertise gap between the leader and other team members; and

(b) to quickly observe and adjust when it is difficult for team members to perceive the whole of

the task.

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Bridging an expertise gap. A common reason to implement and maintain a manager-led

structure is that a given leader is significantly more expert than other team members. When a

team leader knows a great deal more about a task or decision than does the team, the leader must

provide some direction to the team about how to perform the task or what decision to make. For

instance, when novice players participate in team sports, the players may know very little about

strategies, roles, or even the rules of the game. It is thus incumbent on the head coach to tightly

manage the processes and performance strategies until players understand the rules, tasks, and

tactics. In the domain of management, Vroom and colleagues have well-developed research that

shows that leaders who have more information than their followers are more effective when they

use an autocratic style, in which they dictate both the processes and outcomes of decisions

(Vroom & Yetton, 1973; Vroom & Jago, 1988).

Further, it is well-documented that teams predictably and repeatedly fail to facilitate their

own decision-making processes; without direction, most groups fail to pool sufficient decision-

relevant information before making a decision. However, a leader who knows how to direct

such decision-making processes can mitigate these problems by structuring the team interactions.

For instance, Larson and colleagues (1998) found that having a formal leader improved

information processing and decision-making when those leaders asked questions and highlighted

unique information. Additionally, Peterson (1997) found that leaders who use a directive style to

advocate for an inclusive decision process (rather than for a particular alternative) tend to

promote more information sharing and better group decisions. Similarly, Eisenhardt’s (1989)

study of strategic decisions in the micro-computing industry found that those CEOs that put an

emphasis of processing more information, considered more alternatives simultaneously, and

imposed processes for sharing information quickly tended to make better quality decisions. In

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sum, when leaders used their authority to impose processes that stimulate information processing

(rather than to advocate for a particular outcomes), better and faster decisions tended to result.

Observing the whole team and task. Beyond the ability to structure and direct

processes that groups often find difficult, team leaders may be better positioned than members to

observe the complex dynamics of large, fast-moving teams. For instance, in American football,

coaches craft and control the strategy and “plays,” which dictate the precise movements of

players on the field (Katz & Koenig, 2001; Keidel, 1987). When playing, no one player can

monitor all players simultaneously; in fact, players can seldom see more than one or two others

at a time. Similarly, orchestral conductors are positioned such that they can hear all the orchestra

members simultaneously, while those sitting in the orchestra often hear only those sitting near

them as they are playing. When team members cannot monitor their own processes as they

perform the work, giving a single leader the authority to monitor and manage the process may be

desirable.

Challenges for Manager-led Teams

Because manager-led teams require a single individual to fulfill a host of functions, such

teams are extremely demanding for individual team leaders (Day, Sin, & Chen, 2004), creating

critical leadership challenges. Indeed, much of the literature on manager-led teams has focused

on their disadvantages relative to self-managing teams. We view the three most critical

leadership challenges for manager-led teams as (a) preventing motivation losses, (b) minimizing

evaluative pressure, and (c) avoiding conformity pressure.

Preventing motivation losses. The most common problem specified is that team

members tend to be less motivated and satisfied than those on self-managed teams (i.e. Cohen &

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Ledford, 1994; Goodman, Devadas, & Hughson, 1988), often leading to less productivity

(Beekun, 1989; Guzzo, Jette, & Katzell, 1985; Kirkman & Rosen, 1999). Research on work

motivation has shown that, when workers lack autonomy over their own work processes, they

feel less responsibility for work outcomes, and are less motivated to work on their tasks (Gagne

& Deci, 2005; Grant & Parker, 2009; Hackman & Oldham, 1980). Thus, leaders of manager-led

teams must often take potent steps to counteract this motivational decrement.

Minimizing evaluative pressure. Another structural disadvantage of a manager-led team is

that team leaders keep sole authority to monitor and evaluate the team’s work processes.

Because team leaders need to observe the team at work to fulfill this function, team members

often experience such surveillance as evaluative. Increased evaluative surveillance tends to

increase psychological arousal in ways that inhibit learning, experimentation, and performance

on novel tasks (i.e. Zajonc, 1965) and may also decrease intrinsic motivation (Deci, Koestner, &

Ryan, 1999) and creativity (Amabile, 1983; 1996; Amabile & Fisher, 2009). Further, using

talented people in surveillance roles is often an inefficient use of human resources (Pfeffer,

1997); and an under-use of team member knowledge and skills (Allmendinger, Hackman, &

Lehman, 1996).

Avoiding conformity pressures. Last, while having a leader who can direct decision-

making can sometimes be beneficial, it also introduces strong conformity pressures that lead to

sub-optimal information processing and decision-making. Because it is often difficult to

identify which group members hold decision-relevant knowledge (Gardner, in press; Stasser &

Stewart, 1992), formal team leaders often hold influence disproportionate to their expertise, as

members often inappropriately use their status as a proxy for task-relevant expertise (Bunderson,

2003; Garnder, in press). Further, when team leaders are also responsible for monitoring and

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evaluating member performance, members feel obliged to agree with the leader, which can lead

to dysfunctional conformity pressures (Janis, 1982; Leanna, 1985).

Imperatives for Leaders of Manager-led Teams

While we can speculate on the advantages of manager-led teams, these advantages have

seldom been documented by research. Instead, most extant research documents the advantages

of self-management. Therefore, the imperative for those who hold authority over manager-led

teams is to minimize the negative effects of such authority in three ways.

Use manager-led structures sparingly. The most important choice for leaders of

manager-led teams is to decide the degree to which they will maintain a manager-led structure

versus promote greater self-management among their members. While manager-led teams

prevail in a few industries, they are seldom the structure of choice in modern, knowledge-

intensive organizations. Even in unique contexts, such as orchestras or operating rooms, leaders

of manager-led teams would be well-served to consider promoting self-management in at least

part of the work.

Promote psychological safety. Leaders of manager-led teams must balance their function to

monitor and evaluate team members with the need for those members to learn from mistakes, ask

questions, and exercise their own creativity. One of the most fruitful areas of research along

these lines has been research into how leaders create a climate of psychological safety

(Edmondson, 1999; 2003). Psychological safety is “a shared belief held by members of a team

that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson, 1999, p. 350). When team

members fear that others will criticize or ridicule their ideas, members are often hesitant to admit

mistakes or make suggestions. Thus, psychological safety has been an important determinant of

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learning behavior in a variety of settings, including manufacturing (Edmondson, 1999), cardiac

surgery teams (Edmonson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2001), and neo-natal care units (Nembhard &

Edmondson, 2006). Leaders of teams of all types can promote psychological safety by being

accessible to members, explicitly asking for input, and modeling their own fallibility by

admitting mistakes as an opportunity for learning (Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2003;

Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006).

Avoid over-attention to managing task processes in real time. Next, leaders must

make sure that they use their legitimate authority when necessary. Because leaders of manager-

led teams have more responsibility than individuals in teams with different authority structures, it

is easy to become overwhelmed and to ignore crucial aspects of team leadership (Wageman &

Hackman, 2010). Top management teams are among the most guilty, with CEOs frequently

failing to provide adequate direction or boundaries for the team (Wageman, et al., 2008). Even

the title of “team leader” has been found to make leaders more directive and intervene more

frequently (Fisher, 2010) and to invite more interaction from team members (Cohen and Zhou,

1991), which increases the need for the leader to spend time and attention on managing group

process.

Further, leaders of manager-led teams must look to the structure and organizational

context of the team to solve problems, rather than simply relying on their authority over task and

process. Manager-led teams are most persistent in industries with well-defined task and role

structures, as shown in the orchestral, medical, and sports examples earlier in this chapter. Most

significantly, leaders in these industries tend to have little control over the task itself. As will be

seen in the remainder of this chapter, task design is a critical lever for team effectiveness: In

sports, task design cannot account for variations in performance because the basic rules of the

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game are predetermined; in health care and the military, many tasks have standard operating

procedures that are difficult to change and inflexible roles that support these procedures. Such

domains can be hotbeds of manager-led teams because there is little debate about what the task is

or which role qualifies one to be a team leader. However, because such practices have become

so standardized, the lowest hanging fruits for leaders may be in the structure and context –

including the manager-led authority structure itself.

Directions for Future Research on Manager-led Teams

Given that manager-led teams have both challenges and opportunities, the obvious

question for future research is when best to use them. In other words, under what conditions do

the theoretical advantages of manager-led teams outweigh the advantages of increased self-

management? As we noted, manager-led teams seem to be most common when the task and role

structure of teams is well-defined. Given the dearth of research supporting the use of manager-

led teams, is that authority structure truly the optimal strategy in domains such as surgery,

orchestras, or sports? Further, it seems likely that institutional forces play a critical role in

sustaining leader led teams (Hackman & Wageman, 2005b). Future research should be about

manager-led teams should also address how and why manager-led teams have been sustained in

the contexts we listed and whether these mechanisms are functional for team performance.

As we noted, manager-led teams also give a great deal of responsibility to the team

leader. Most significantly, if a team leader is solely responsible for monitoring and managing

the team’s process, he/she must have some skill in diagnosing group processes as they unfold

and intervening at opportune moments. While existing research has sketched what team leaders

should do to improve group processes, there have been few investigations into when to act (or

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when to wait) and how skilled leaders make such assessments. Thus, a crucial area for future

research is the diagnostic and interpretive process of team leaders and their relationship to the

timing of process interventions (Fisher, 2010; Wageman, Fisher & Hackman, 2009).

Finally, it is clear that many sophisticated team leaders pave the way for their teams to

become more self-managing, just as many self-managing teams may voluntarily appoint a team

leader that eventually consolidates his or her authority. Thus, two crucial, yet unanswered,

questions are: how do manager-led teams become self-managing and how do self-managing

teams become manager-led? Indeed, examining the conditions under which manager-led teams

increase their level of self-management may be the most crucial area of research for this

authority structure.

Leadership of Self-managing Teams

Self-managing teams are teams in which members have the authority not only to execute

the work, but also to monitor their own performance quality and manage their own processes. In

other words, they can make choices, in the absence of managerial instructions, about the main

procedures, timing, and sequencing of their own work, as well as their coordination with others

groups and individuals. Managing the quality of the work and making decisions about intra-

team processes, therefore, are leadership functions that are fulfilled by the team members

themselves.

Self-managing teams typically have a formal designated leader who retains authority to

provide feedback or rewards to the team, and alter or determine team composition, and who

holds responsibility for articulating group purposes (Druskat & Pescosolido, 2002; Gersick &

Hackman, 1990; Langfred, 2000; Wageman, 2001). Those purposes may originate well above

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the teams' immediate leaders, as might other important team design features such as how reward

systems are designed and workloads allocated. For example, in customer service settings in

which self-managed teams share accountability for an identified set of customers, a front-line

supervisor provides hands on coaching and feedback, but team memberships are assigned by

higher-level managers, and reward systems are designed at the corporate level. Therefore, the

array of individuals fulfilling leadership functions for such teams tends to be broad.

Nevertheless, in self-managing teams, unlike in manager-led teams, team members themselves

have considerable autonomy to determine their own work processes and therefore have a

substantial leadership role themselves.

Examples of some common self-managing teams include multi-disciplinary health care

teams, often led by a nurse manager, and composed of nurses, physicians, perhaps physical and

occupational therapists, and other health care workers. Such teams do not choose their own

members or determine how rewards are distributed, but they have great latitude in how the work

is executed for the care of their patients. Team members share responsibility for the wellbeing of

patients and for coordinating their activities with each other (Edmondson, 1999; Nembhard &

Edmondson, 2006; West, et al., 2003). Other kinds of self-managing teams include production

teams, in which quality assurance, production line pace, team member task assignments, and

some fabrication processes are determined and executed by the workers themselves, although the

teams typically have a supervisor responsible for worker schedules (and therefore team

composition), ongoing coaching, and establishing production goals (Druskat & Wheeler, 2003;

Kirkman & Rosen, 1999; Manz & Sims, 1987). Finally, many knowledge-work teams such as

product and software development teams also belong to the category of self-managing teams.

Though members hold full authority to decide how to deploy their collective resources in

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creating a new product, they typically report to a team leader who has additional authorities and

responsibilities (such as forming, launching, and coaching the team). Self-managing teams may

well be both the largest category of teams in modern workplaces as well as the ones most

frequently studied. Many teams that are typically thought of as self-managing but that also have

authority over aspects of their own design or context are in fact what we call self-designing

teams, a form of team we will address in the next section of this chapter. Here we address the

key opportunities and challenges of self-managing teams, and the critical leadership capacities

necessary to support their effectiveness.

Opportunities for Self-managed Teams

Self-managed teams became common in US organizations during the 1980s because of

growing beliefs that they offered certain performance advantages that manager led teams did not,

stemming from two trends. First, the competitive losses of American companies to those from

Japan led to the explosion of Total Quality Management, a program that relies heavily on

frontline workers devising, monitoring and managing improvements in the work processes to

enhance quality, and “empowered” work teams that make decisions to address needs of

customers in real time. At the same time, manufacturing firms in Europe and Asia had begun

altering traditional assembly line designs, creating teams of individuals who shared collective

responsibility for the process and quality of building whole subassemblies of automobiles (Adler,

1995; Fleishman et al., 1991; Hackman & Walton, 1986; Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010;

Sexton, 1994) and other products. These management trends had as their basic underpinnings

the assumption that people actually doing the work are best able to figure out better ways to do

it. Moreover, scholars of the time observed that managing the quality of one's own work and

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interactions with the end users of that work has a powerful motivating effect (thereby enhancing

employee engagement and productivity), and that the kinds of structured improvement processes

involved in the quality movement produced not only a better process in the short-term but a more

capable workforce in the long term (Beekun, 1989; Fleishman et al., 1991; Hackman & Walton,

1986; Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010; Pearce & Ravlin, 1987). Self-managing teams have

tasks that drive positive internal work motivation to a greater degree than do manager-led teams:

(1) they have more autonomy over their work processes, (2) they frequently have greater direct

interaction with the users of their work and (3) they often build whole products or share

accountability for whole customer territories, rather than perform small and routinized pieces of

a larger task (Cohen & Spreitzer, 1994; Cummings, 1981; Hackman & Oldham, 1980). As a

consequence, leader intervention to enhance effort is relatively unneeded, with the work itself

operating as a “substitute for leadership” (Kerr & Jermier, 1978; Hackman & Wageman, 2005b).

The implementation of self-managing teams also involves a major investment in training, thus

building the knowledge and skill of team members beyond what they had under manager-led

authority structures (Kolodny & Kiggundu, 1980; Wall, Kemp, Jackson & Clegg, 1986). All

these benefits bode well for their effectiveness in comparison to manager led teams.

Significant amounts of research have examined the performance impact of implementing

self-managing teams in settings that were previously manager-led. While some studies showed

performance advantages on key indicators of performance such as customer satisfaction and

quality of workmanship (Beekun, 1989; Guzzo, Jette, & Katzell, 1985), attempts to create team

self-management just as often result in poor team performance, individualistic behavior, and

avoidance of decision-making (Cohen & Ledford, 1994; Fleishman et al., 1991; Hackman &

Walton, 1986; Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010; Langfred, 2007). As a consequence, much

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of the subsequent research undertook to identify the antecedents of self-managing team

effectiveness. Among the key such leadership functions identified as major drivers of self-

managing team effectiveness are: (1) changes to the existing structures and systems of the firm

that elicit, promote, and reward increased interdependence among workers and independent

decision making by teams; and (2) changing the behavior of the external leader of the team, most

particularly the hands-on coaching of teams' decision processes.

Altering structures and systems to promote interdependence. Research has

demonstrated that team self-management is facilitated by a supportive organizational climate for

teamwork (e.g., Hempel, Zhang & Han, in press), team-based human resources systems such as

training, development, and information (e.g., Subramony, 2009; Wageman, 2001), and teams

composed of members who welcome working interdependently and embrace the added

responsibility for decision making (Cohen & Spreitzer, 1994; Kirkman & Rosen, 1999).

Moreover, team self-management also results in improved performance to the extent that the

reward system recognizes and rewards excellent team performance over individual performance

(Cohen, Spreitzer, & Ledford, 1996; Fleishman et al., 1991; Hackman & Walton, 1986;

Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010; Rosenbaum et al, 1980; Shea & Guzzo, 1987; Wageman,

1995; 2001). Finally, self-managing teams benefit from an organizational education system that

provides cross-training in multiple skills, or technical consultation for any aspects of the work

that members are not themselves competent to handle (Klaus & Glaser, 1970; Liang, Moreland,

& Argote, 1995; Fleishman et al., 1991; Hackman & Walton, 1986; Morgeson, DeRue, &

Karam, 2010; Salas, Cannon-Bowers & Blickensderfer, 1993). In modern workplaces such as

professional service firms, where work is typically completed by self-managing teams that have

no history of manager-led practice, these same contextual supports also have positive effects

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(Stewart, 2006). In sum, critical leadership functions for developing self-managing teams are

predominantly about making significant investments in creating an organizational context that

elicits, reinforces, and supports interdependence among peers and collective decision making

about work processes.

Coaching. Both scholars and practitioners who write about self-managing teams

effectiveness focus a great deal of attention on what leaders do in their day-to-day interactions

with team members—that is, they focus on hands-on coaching (e.g. Bass, 1957; Berkowitz,

1953; Fiedler, 1958; Jackson, 1953; Likert, 1958; Lippitt, 1940; Manz, 1986; Manz & Sims,

1987; Schlesinger, Jackson, & Butman, 1960). Coaching refers to direct interaction with the

team intended to shape team processes to produce good performance. Pervading the literature on

team coaching is the view that leader coaching behaviors can directly affect team members'

engagement with their task, their ability to work through interpersonal problems that may be

impeding progress, and the degree to which members accept collective responsibility for

performance outcomes. Manz and Sims (1987) showed that the external leadership of self-

managing teams, especially coaching such as eliciting self-observation, self-evaluation and self-

reinforcement by members, were a significant differentiator of effective and ineffective self-

managing team processes. Similarly, reinforcement by external leaders has been shown to

enhance team psychological empowerment (e.g., Cohen & Spreitzer, 1994; Kirkman & Rosen,

1999).

At the same time, Cohen, Spreitzer, and Ledford (1996) found that "encouraging

behavior" (providing feedback intended to enhance team motivation) from supervisors was

negatively associated with team performance as assessed both by managers and by customers,

and Beekun (1989) found that self-managing teams that had no coaches significantly

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outperformed those that did. Morgeson (2005) showed that leader active interventions had a

negative impact on team's perceptions of the leader, though when events were sufficiently

routine the impact of those interventions on performance was positive. In sum, existing research

evidence suggests that leaders’ coaching in some circumstances fosters team self-management,

the quality of members' interpersonal relationships, and member satisfaction with the team and

its work. Yet in others it had either negative or neutral effects.

Challenges for Self-managing Teams

The main challenges identified in the research literature on self-managing teams are: (1)

resistance to change both among team members and among managers in the transition from

manager-led to self-managing teams, (2) a concomitant tendency of so-called self-managing

teams to devolve into manager-led teams; and (3) an excessive focus by both leaders and team

members on teams’ own internal processes.

Overcoming resistance to shared decision-making. There are significant challenges to

leaders in getting frontline teams to accept managerial responsibilities for the processes and

quality of their work, especially in instances where rewards for improved productivity are not

shared with the teams themselves (Barker, 1993; Kirkman & Rosen, 1999; Stewart & Manz,

1995). Moreover, research has shown that organizations face significant challenges in changing

the behaviors of those holding supervisory roles to one of coaching rather than supervision. A

critical question raised by the conflicting findings of research on the effectiveness of self-

managed teams was the degree to which these teams were self-managing in name only.

The difficulties of fostering genuine self-management have been well-documented.

These difficulties include inability of managers to release control of work processes to teams

20    

(Golembiewski, 1995; Hut & Molleman, 1998), as well as to resistance from team members to

taking on self-management (Balkema & Molleman, 1999; Wellins, Byham & Wilson, 1991).

Most research on self-managing teams has focused on introducing such teams into

formerly manager-led and individualistic frontline environments such as production lines, sales,

and customer service. Members of these newly formed teams held a history of working

independently of their peers. Moreover, in such highly structured workplaces, work processes

had been dictated by supervisors or by the technology of the assembly line itself. In this

environment, introducing self-managing teams both increases teams’ authority and

accountability for the quality of work processes and increases interdependence with peers,

creating a host of leadership challenges. The environments where these changes take place

frequently are unionized as well, and therefore have the history of considerable management-

worker suspicion and a transactional relationship between the firm and the worker typified by

control-type environments (Walton, 2003; Walton & Hackman, 1986).

There is evidence that when teams are given greater accountability for decisions they may

view this greater authority as an attempt by the organization to ask them to produce more and

take on added responsibility without experiencing the tangible benefits of those changes

themselves (Marks & DeMeuse, 2003; Silver, Randolph, & Siebert, 2006). Moreover, workers

with strong preferences to work autonomously may continue to pursue their own approaches to

the work, resisting the obligations of joint decision-making with their teammates (Wageman,

1995). Organizational culture characteristics such as power distance (Kirkman & Shapiro,

2001), which refers to a collective desire for large differences in the authority of leaders and

followers to be maintained (Hofstede, 1984), can exacerbate the desire to avoid taking on

authority that was previously the domain of managers.

21    

Parallel to these challenges based in the perceptions, values, and motives of workers are

similar sources of psychological resistance from leaders. For example, Manz and Sims (1987)

showed that front line managers can experience the change of authority toward more team self-

management as a direct threat to their value and power in the organization, and they frequently

lack the skills to offer coaching and consultation rather than issue orders and set goals (Manz,

1992). Organizational and national culture can influence leader resistance to sharing authority as

well. While the high collectivist values of China, for example, make working in teams relatively

natural, the dominant leadership style investing all authority in leaders undermines the

development of team behavioral self-management (Bell, 2007; Cheng et al., 2004). Thus, the

theoretical improvement in worker autonomy intended by a change to self-management can be

undermined by the actual behaviors of leaders and teams. For those who would exercise

leadership to realize the benefits of team self-management, then, one critical leadership function

is creating conditions to prepare team leaders for coaching roles by building their sense of

efficacy and providing direct experience of a new way of working with teams (Golembiewski,

1995; Hut & Molleman, 1998; Manz 1986).

Preventing self-managed teams from becoming de facto manager-led teams. One

common consequence, then, of the less-than-natural transition of manager-led to self-managing

teams is for team leaders to recapture control over work processes, making the teams “self-

managing” in name only. Research has suggested that the behaviors of teams and leaders are a

dynamic, exerting mutual influence over one another. For example, senior leadership teams

frequently are initially designed by chief executives to be self-managing—that is, the chief

executive intends to hold authority for deciding the purpose and composition of the team, but

asks members to take on shared accountability for key decisions affecting the organization. Yet

22    

senior teams are frequently ineffective (Edmondson, Roberto, & Watkins, 2003; Hambrick,

1994; Wageman, et al., 2008). While some writers suggest that their ineffectiveness is a direct

result of the leader's unwillingness to share power and create a genuine consensus decision

process (Katzenbach, 1997), it may also be the case that leaders take back authority when the

team is poor at making decisions together, embroiled instead in turf battles and conflicts

(Wageman, et al., 2008). A challenge for leaders of self-managing teams, then, may be

exercising self-control at moments when the team is struggling to operate effectively, and

avoiding taking over their work. While this pattern has been observed and has sparked

commentary, there has yet to be a systematic study of the potentially dynamic relations between

team and leader behavior with respect to team authority.

Promoting adequate external focus. The necessity to learn how to make team decisions

effectively and to monitor and manage the quality of their teammates’ work and work processes

can capture much of the attention of self-managing team members. Moreover, significant

evidence has accumulated that interpersonal and task-based conflict (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003;

Jehn & Bendersky, 2003; Langfred, 2007), shifts in trust levels, and struggles to manage

behavioral interdependence (Langfred, 2004; Porter & Lilly, 1996), can captivate the attention of

members—and all at the expense of attention to key external relationships and events such as

customer needs and relations with other teams.

Evidence for the importance of external activities to self-managing team performance has

been mounting. Ancona and her colleagues have most fully developed this area of research by

mapping the range of activities that groups use to engage with their environments, clients, and

other external individuals and groups (cf. Gladstein, 1984; Ancona & Caldwell, 1987; Ancona,

1990). She showed that teams who remain relatively isolated from their environments, focused

23    

instead on internal activities, or merely observed the outside environment without actively

engaging outsiders were significantly less effective (Ancona, 1990). Similarly, Gersick (1988)

showed that project teams that had an external focus at the calendar midpoints of their projects

were significantly more likely to complete their tasks effectively.

The main advantages of self-managing teams—enhanced commitment to the work, better

performance strategies, and excellent use of team member capabilities—all have been shown to

be significantly better when the team actively engages in some form of task-relevant

attentiveness to its external environment. At the same time, while the virtues of external focus

have been well documented by Ancona and her colleagues (cf. Gladstein, 1984; Ancona &

Caldwell, 1987; Ancona, 1990), the leadership functions that promote adequate external focus

have not. There is significant variation in self-managing teams' attentiveness to their

environments and in their tendency to focus their energies on internal vs. external processes.

Relatively little is known about the influences on teams' external activities, or the leadership

actions by members and authorities that enable self-managed teams to address this balance

effectively.

Imperatives for Leaders of Self-managing Teams

What has research shown are the kinds of leader activities that are most critical to

enabling self-managing team effectiveness? Two particular patterns emerge with respect to the

activities of external leaders and their impact on self-managing teams: (a) the relative influence

of designing a team well versus coaching it well and (b) the importance of timing.

Design before coaching. Leadership functions divide into two basic conceptual

categories: (a) establishing (or influencing) the design features of teams; and (b) providing

24    

hands-on coaching and consultation. In a longitudinal field study of customer service teams,

Wageman (2001) directly measured the impact of these two main functions of leaders of self-

managing teams. The primary influences on effective self-management were the design choices

of front line leaders and their leaders including (a) the design of the task in terms of its

interdependence (accomplished in this case by the frontline manager), (b) the clarity of team-

level purposes, and (c) rewards for group performance (determined by the manager one level up).

Only when these basic design conditions were well-established did front-line leaders' hands-on

coaching make a positive difference in the overall effectiveness of self-managing teams.

Moreover, the magnitude of the effect of poor coaching (including taking back authority by

identifying the teams' problems for them and asserting the leader's own solutions) was also

determined by quality of team design. That is, well-designed teams were more robust – that is,

less undermined by poor coaching – than those whose basic design features were shaky.

In this view, leaders have the opportunity to coach a team to higher levels of self-

management and superior performance only when the team is relatively well-designed. If design

conditions are stacked in favor of good performance, then the team coach can help the team

exploit its favorable circumstances. If the team is poorly designed, on the other hand, attempts to

foster team effectiveness through hands-on coaching may be futile or even backfire. In such

cases, the flawed design may create dysfunctional processes so strong and preoccupying that

coaching interventions risk merely adding to the disarray (Woodman & Sherwood, 1980).

Pay attention to timing. The efficacy of leaders' interventions may depend not just on

their focus but also upon the time in the group's life cycle when a team leader chooses to provide

them (Wageman, Fisher, & Hackman, 2009; Hackman & Wageman, 2005). In recent years there

has been an outpouring of research findings on temporal aspects of group behavior, much of

25    

which bears directly on team leader decision-making about the timing of interventions (see for

example, Ancona & Chong, 1999; Fisher, 2010; Gersick & Hackman, 1990; Langfred, 2000;

Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). Gersick's (1988) findings are particularly relevant. In a field study

of the life histories of a number of self-managing project teams whose performance periods

ranged from several days to several months, she found that each of the groups she tracked

developed a distinctive approach toward its task as soon as it commenced work, and stayed with

that approach until precisely half way between its first meeting and its project deadline. At the

midpoint of their lives, almost all teams underwent a major transition. In a concentrated burst of

changes, they dropped old patterns of behavior, re-engaged with outside supervisors, and

adopted new perspectives on their work. Following the midpoint transition, groups entered a

final phase of focus on executing their tasks to the point of completion.

The findings of Gersick (1988) and others raise the possibility that the readiness of self-

managing teams for external leaders' interventions changes systematically across their life

cycles. Specifically, there are three times in a team's life when members may be especially open

to interventions that address each of the three key performance processes: (a) at the beginning,

when a team is just starting its work, it is especially open to interventions that focus on the effort

members will apply to their work; (b) at the midpoint, when the team has completed about half

its work (or half the allotted time has elapsed), it is especially open to interventions that help

members reflect on their task performance strategy; and (c) at the end, when the work is finished,

the team is ready to entertain interventions aimed at helping members draw on their experiences

to build the team's complement of knowledge and skill (Hackman & Wageman, 2005a).

Directions for Future Research on Self-managing Teams

26    

The findings of the scholarly research on self-managing teams raise several intriguing

questions and promising avenues for future investigation. These include: (a) the dynamic

relationship between team and leader behavior in fulfilling key leadership functions; and (b) the

challenges of developing leadership capacity to support self-managing team effectiveness. These

are described briefly in turn, below.

Dynamic relations of team and leader behavior. Recall that among the challenges of

self-managing teams is the difficulty of implementing them de novo—and the subsequent risk

that external leaders undermine team authority by taking back their decision rights over task

processes. There exists the possibility that leaders take over the management of the tasks of

poorly functioning teams because members themselves are not fulfilling those functions

effectively. Feeling accountable for teams' performance, leaders may respond to low team self-

management and poor performance by monitoring team performance more closely, by increasing

their own interventions in the work of their teams, and by providing fewer cues and rewards for

team self-management. This hypothesis is consistent with other research on how follower

behavior can shape leader style (e.g., Farris & Lim, 1969; Lowin & Craig, 1968), and it merits

additional investigation in the context of self-managing teams.

Developing the capabilities of self-managing teams' external leaders. While a great

deal is known about the conditions that influence self-managing team effectiveness, the kinds of

coaching that do and do not help self-managing teams, and the ways in which predictable times

in the life of a group can be used to shape effectiveness, these findings raise important questions

relevant to improving the effectiveness of such teams: How and under what conditions are

external leaders best able to learn these practices? There are significant conceptual, behavioral,

and emotional challenges to learning to lead self-managing teams. For example, understanding

27    

what the basic design features are that such teams need, recognizing the degree to which they are

in place, and formulating a strategy for getting them in place are significant conceptual

challenges (Wageman & Hackman, 2010). At the same time, refraining from intervening in

team process, choosing an effective time to do so, and intervening in ways that encourage self-

management can be significant emotional and behavioral challenges (Manz & Sims, 1987).

Almost no research has yet focused on the personal characteristics, leadership development

interventions, or organizational conditions that enhance these team leadership capacities, and we

suggest this may be a fruitful avenue for additional investigation into the leadership of self-

managing teams.

Leadership of Self-designing Teams

Self-designing teams are self-managing teams in which members also can determine key

features of the team and/or their organizational context, but not their overall purposes. Most

often, self-designing teams can alter their own membership, how rewards are distributed, and

what information or technical consultation is offered to the team. Because self-designing teams

can influence both their structure and their processes, they control many of the key conditions

that foster team effectiveness (Hackman, 2002). While the term “self-designing teams” is rare in

the research literature (Bennett & Kidwell, 2001), many teams that are referred to in particular

studies as “self-managing” also have authority over some aspect of their own design and thus

would be called self-designing teams in our terminology.

For instance, many front-line teams have some authority over their own membership and

rewards, in addition to managing and monitoring their own work processes. Barker (1993)

described how teams at a telecommunications manufacturing facility could interview, hire and

28    

fire their own members, as well as dock members’ pay for violating team norms. Other

examples of self-designing teams include task forces charged with leveraging new market

opportunities (Gersick, 1990) or identifying the causes of organizational performance problems

and proposing solutions (Gabarro & Clawson, 1984), and academic research teams (Bennett &

Kidwell, 2001). Self-designing teams may also be more common in flat or entrepreneurial

organizations where who holds authority over team design is often ambiguous.

While self-managing teams are often deliberately implemented to boost motivation and

productivity, self-designing teams may come about less intentionally. When organizations

implement self-managing teams, they often do so to minimize traditional hierarchical leadership

(Manz, 1992) and leave as many decisions as possible to the teams. However, because authority

and resources are diffused throughout complex matrix or multi-national organizations

(Cummings & Haas, in press; Janz, 1999; O’Leary, Mortenson, & Woolley, 2011), teams often

have accountabilities they share with other teams and members with diverse goals. Thus, self-

managed teams in these organizations may spend much of their time figuring out how to

construe the task or engaged in negotiating team design features, gradually taking authority over

those design features themselves. In taking a functional view of team leadership, we view all of

these activities as an exercise of leadership, regardless of whether they are done by a nominal

team leader, other team members, or those external to the team.

Opportunities for Self-designing Teams

The opportunities afforded to self-designing teams are simple – their authority over team,

task, and/or organizational context gives them a range of ways to adjust their design as task

demands shift over time. Because team members are likely to be the most familiar with the task

29    

demands, client needs, and optimal work processes, they theoretically are better positioned to

understand the team’s design needs – especially in novel or uncertain tasks with which external

leaders have had little experience. Thus, self-designing teams have the opportunity to: (a) adjust

their membership to meet task demands, (b) structure rewards to maximize motivation and

distributive justice, (c) requisition the information they need in real time, and (d) increase their

members’ leadership capacity (Manz, 199; Wageman, et al., 2008).

Refining team membership. One specific opportunity for self-designing teams is to

recognize the need for additional knowledge or skills, and to add new team members to address

it. Because knowledge-intensive tasks are frequently non-routine or uncertain (e.g. Cross et al.,

2008; Rulke & Galaskiewicz, 2000), teams may encounter problems that were unanticipated at

team launch. Thus, teams with the authority to add people with relevant expertise that the team

lacks are best positioned to succeed. For instance, in their study of teams in a design firm,

Fisher, Amabile, and Pillemer (2010) found that many senior designers and engineers worked on

teams only on an as-needed basis – “project mentors” kept some of their time flexible so that

teams could “buy” their hours if their expertise was required. Similarly, Ancona, Bresman, and

Caldwell (2009) described how a Microsoft software engineering team self-managed adding and

shedding members as the team moved from brainstorming to design. They further proposed that

such self-managed membership flexibility is a key characteristic of innovative, externally

focused teams.

Removing members. Self-designing teams can also use authority over membership to

attract more productive individuals and/or to rid themselves of habitual social-loafers (Barker,

1993; Delong, Mody, & Ager, 2003). For instance, teams in C&S Grocer’s distribution

warehouse had authority over their membership, such that they could dismiss underperforming

30    

members and all members were free to join other teams. This arrangement led to an intense

internal marketplace for labor. Because the teams were paid based on productivity, extremely

productive individuals could earn more by joining better-performing teams. Top management at

C&S Grocers saw these self-designing teams as the key to the organization’s growing profits and

market share (Delong, Mody, & Ager, 2003). Further, self-designing teams who can dismiss

their own members also have considerable authority to punish those who do not conform to team

norms (Barker, 1993), which can increase their control over member motivation and behavior.

Distributing rewards and punishments. Beyond using team membership as a mechanism

for rewarding and punishing members, self-designing teams may also have some control over

performance evaluation or pay distribution. Like the ability to hire and fire members, giving a

team control over its own reward system will give it greater control over the effort members

exert (Barker, 1993). However, giving teams the authority to decide how to evaluate each other

and distribute rewards accordingly presents many difficulties, which are detailed in the next

section on “Challenges.” If self-designing teams are to benefit from authority over their rewards,

they would be well-served to agree on a collective reward. Although rewarding individuals with

recognition, promotions, and money is common in organizations, rewarding the team as a

collective is often more effective at engendering and sustaining collective effort (Druskat &

Kayes, 2000; Lawler III, 2000; Spreitzer, Noble, Mishra, & Cooke, 1999). However, such teams

must be cautious to avoid “hybrid” rewards that simultaneously reward group and individual

performance. In her study of self-managing service technicians at Xerox, Wageman (2001) found

that the pure individual and pure team reward systems led to better performance than did teams

that had a hybrid reward system.

Obtaining key information. One of the most over-looked design features that self-

31    

designing teams may have control over is their access to task-relevant information. In order to

develop and maintain a task-appropriate work strategy, teams often need up-to-date, trustworthy

information about their work environment, including what is happening with customers, supply

chains, or other parts of the organization. However, in modern, knowledge-intensive

organizations, information is one of the most valuable resources and can be hoarded by the

powerful; front-line, self-managing teams may find it difficult to get task-relevant information

when management feels such information is too “competitively sensitive” (Hackman, 2002).

Thus, a self-designing team with the authority to requisition whatever information it needs,

whenever it needs it, will be much better able to make well-considered decisions about its

strategy and deliverables.

Building members’ leadership capacity. Last, self-designing teams have a significant

opportunity to build members’ capacity for leadership by giving them experience managing

membership, rewards, and information systems – tasks often reserved for upper management. In

settings such as senior leadership teams, such teams may be a vehicle for leaders of particular

areas to think strategically about the whole enterprise, rather than about their particular domain

(Hackman & Wageman, 2010; Wageman, et al. 2008). Even at lower levels of organizational

bureaucracy, individuals who are asked to think strategically about team structure and

environment will be encouraged to learn about the organization and to hone their strategic

thinking skills (Manz, 1992; Ancona & Caldwell, 1992), thus building the leadership capacity of

the organization.

Challenges for Self-designing Teams

The main challenges for self-designing teams also stem from the broad scope of their

32    

authority: their varied responsibilities can lead to the underuse or misuse of team design. Here,

we summarize three of these challenges: (a) managing competing demands for attention, (b)

having difficult conversations in a team of equals, and (c) limiting the overuse of authority.

Managing competing demands for attention. Self-design inherently invites teams to

consider both design and process changes when seeking to improve their teamwork. Many

aspects of design – such as bringing in new members or requisitioning information – require a

working knowledge of a teams’ external environment (e.g. the skills of others in the

organization; where relevant information might be located) (Ancona, Bresman, & Caldwell,

2009. Thus, a self-designing team will need to keep its attention focused in more directions than

a self-managing one would. Because attention is a scarce resource in knowledge-intensive

organizations (March & Simon, 1958; Hansen & Haas, 2001), teams responsible for their own

design may have difficulty both completing their task and attending their own design, especially

when improving the design is time-consuming. Such multi-tasking can be especially

problematic when team members have many other accountabilities besides the team (Cummings

& Haas, in press; O’Leary, et al., 2011) or when it requires the team to increase monitoring of its

external environment (Waller, 1997).

Having difficult conversations in a team of equals.    Even when a self-designing team is

attentive to its own structure, it may still be “under-designed” (Ancona & Nadler, 1989) because

exercising its authority would be interpersonally difficult. Specifically, research has found that

many teams have difficulty managing their own membership or evaluating their teammates

because they perceive the costs to them as individuals as greater than the benefits to the team

(Peiperl, 1999). For instance, many teams will willingly add new members to address shifting

task demands, but do not simultaneously shed members whose expertise is no longer needed

33    

(Hackman, 2002; Hackman & Wageman, 2010). Many boards of directors and top management

teams suffer from this problem (Wageman, et al., 2008), leading to the team becoming too large

to have effective discussions or make decisions (Levine & Moreland, 1998; Hackman & Vidmar,

1970). When teams become overlarge, members often become frustrated and begin to complete

the work individually or in smaller groups, neutering the original team purpose (Hackman &

Wageman, 2008).

Similarly, when a team can distribute rewards to its own members, it requires team members

to honestly evaluate each other to distribute them equitably. However, members often distort

their evaluations of their peers when those evaluations are used to distribute rewards to

individuals (Peiperl, 1999). Often, teams evenly distribute rewards, regardless of merit, rather

than have the difficult conversation about whether one member worked slightly harder than

another (Hackman, 2002). While the authority to distribute rewards may give teams a

mechanism to punish social loafers and reward extraordinary contributors, it may also beget

difficult conversations that members wish to avoid. Thus, the intended benefits of peer

evaluation and reward distribution are rarely realized (Peiperl, 1999).

Limiting overuse of authority. Another challenge of self-designing teams is that they have

more potential to misuse their authority (Cohen & Bailey, 1997; Wageman & Mannix, 2003). A

number of scholars have wondered whether increasing a team’s autonomy is a way to tighten

surveillance and control over individual effort (Barker, 1993; Gryzb, 1984; Sinclair, 1992). For

instance, in his ethnography of manufacturing teams with control of team membership and

rewards, Barker (1993) found that, over time, some self-designing teams set rules more

draconian than any organization would (e.g., “if you’re more than 5 minutes late, you’re docked

a day’s pay”: Barker, 1993, p. 428). Because self-designing teams are often more self-contained

34    

and independent, the danger of coercive norms developing is perhaps higher than in self-

managing or manager-led teams.

Self-designing teams also face a danger of over-focusing on information search when they

have the authority to requisition information and little oversight into whether they achieve their

task. When teams have unclear goals or deadlines (Eisenhardt, 1989) or assume a defensive

orientation (Woolley, in press) they may request and process information as a substitute for

working on the task (Hackman, 2011). Because information takes time to process and there is a

seemingly endless supply of it, the authority to requisition information can be a dangerous lure.

Further, even when such teams receive relevant information, it may not be in a form convenient

for them to process (Hackman, 2002), adding to the time required. Because self-designing teams

are likely to requisition information that they do not routinely access, it is more likely to be in a

form preferred by others. Thus, self-designing teams should ask for only the information they

need and work quickly to make streams of necessary real-time information available and

digestible (Eisenhardt, 1989).

Imperatives for Leaders of Self-Designing Teams

Overall, self-designing teams have many opportunities to match their design to idiosyncratic

tasks demands and member preferences. However, each of aspect of team and task design may

present costly problems, which teams must learn to minimize. Formal leaders can play an

important role in developing those capacities within teams.

Support good quality membership choices. First, leaders of self-designing teams can

provide coaching and consultation to help those teams manage well the changeover of

membership. Leaders can help self-designing teams to identify potential new members with

35    

task-relevant expertise, while creating norms that allow current members to leave the team

without hard feelings or political repercussions.

Promote excellent self-diagnosis. Leaders of self-designing teams can support their

effectiveness by helping them create structured processes to conduct effective peer review and

distribute rewards in ways that create both perceived fairness and performance-contingency.

Such reviews have been shown to be most effective when they are tied to collective (rather than

individual) rewards and are strongly supported by the organization (Peiperl, 1999). However, for

self-designing teams to best realize the learning and motivational benefits of peer evaluation and

reward distribution, leaders should encourage a discussion of the most meaningful dimensions of

performance to be evaluated.

Keep the purpose clear. Last, but most importantly, leaders of self-designing teams can

play a critical role in clearly articulating the team’s purpose – and reiterating it frequently. Self-

designing teams have many tools at their disposal and risk diffusing member attention or

drowning in information. Articulating a clear, challenging, and compelling direction to orient,

energize, and motivate such teams is thus one of the most important tasks of leaders of self-

designing teams.

Directions for Future Research

While the conclusions above about self-designing teams can be gleaned indirectly from the

research literature, this body of work is quite underdeveloped. Thus, the next steps in research

on self-designing teams are likely to be descriptive, addressing questions such as how prevalent

self-designing teams are in organizations, what tasks they are used for, and what design features

they most commonly control. From this descriptive platform, further research on the conditions

36    

under which self-managing teams can be given authority over specific design features can be

conducted.

Exploring good uses of self-designing teams. For what tasks or purposes might self-

designing teams be most effective? When is it most useful for a team to have authority over its

own membership and when is it counter- productive? Self-designing teams are seldom intended

to control all of their own design features. However, it is possible high-functioning self-

managing teams would benefit from increased control of their reward structures, membership,

and resources. The question, though, is when should self-managing teams be given control over

certain design features? Much more research is needed to understand the types of tasks that such

teams do well and the conditions under which they thrive. Because it can be very challenging

and demanding to have all of the design features under team control, those designing the

authority system must be judicious in deciding which design features a team controls and think

through why giving the team this authority will help with the task.

Leadership of Self-governing Teams

Self-governing teams are teams that convene for their own self-defined purposes and/or

who have the authority to define purposes both for themselves and for others. Self-governing

teams have authority over their own design, including the membership of the team and the

context within which it operates. Examples of self-governing teams include entrepreneurial

startup teams in which the team is formed by a partnership of peers who share leadership of the

entity that they jointly create. Other kinds of common self-governing teams include worker

cooperatives and kibbutzim, small family owned businesses, partnerships in professional service

firms, some performing arts groups, some (but not all) boards of directors, and even

37    

revolutionary groups such as teams that might lead a mutiny in an organization, or start a social

movement in public life.

Note that many of these above-named teams can and do have less than self-governing

authority structures. For example, some entrepreneurial startups can be self-managing or even

manager-led teams, depending on the degree of shared authority over team purposes and the

team's design. In some cases, an initial inventor convenes a team of members of her or his own

choice, and retains authority for devising team purposes, thereby making the leadership team of

the enterprise into a self-managing team rather than a self-governing one. Similarly, while there

are string quartets and chamber orchestras who share authority over determining their musical

repertoire (team purposes), collaborate in selecting new members (team design), and devising

their own rehearsal practices (work processes), there are musical ensembles in which all these

choices are under the authority of a conductor, making such teams manager-led. Finally, in

contexts where the chair of a board of directors also is the chief executive, the other board

members have far less authority than the leader, making them more typically self-managing or

manager-led entities. Nonetheless, there are many examples of self-governing teams, and, as

will be seen, this may be the fastest-growing—and least researched—authority structure for

teams.

Opportunities of self-governing teams

Teams that hold collective authority over their purposes as well as their composition,

context and processes, have significant potential for promoting high levels of collaborative

accomplishment. Much of the work on such teams has focused on two key virtues: (a) the fit

between members' values and team purposes and the impact that fit has on commitment and

viability; and (b) their flexibility and capacity to provide leadership to solve complex multi-

38    

stakeholder problems.

Enhancing values-purpose fit. Self-governing teams are especially well-poised,

compared to other kinds of teams, to create high levels of values-based commitment to the team

and to its purposes, precisely because the team itself has full authority to compose and launch a

team expressly for activities of great value to its members. There is some evidence that a

modern trend in younger generations toward seeking greater work-values fit is spawning an

interest in creating new entities and work opportunities, many of which begin as self-governing

teams (Bornstein, 1998; 2004; Boschee, 1995; Smola & Sutton, 2002). The increasing

individualism of personal career choices around the globe means that countless more people are

crafting unique career paths for themselves, oriented by a determination to find personal meaning

and autonomy in what they do. As a consequence, they are not seeking employment in

traditional firms. At the same time, digitalization and globalization are creating ready access via

technology to many more people, greatly increasing the chances of an individual finding a

handful of others that share his or her aims. Indeed, one internet-based organization that

supports the self-formation of teams has seen the launch of more than 45,000 self-governing

teams in the last few years (Meetup.com, 2011). Nevertheless, it is difficult to find research in

organizational behavior, organizational psychology, or social psychology about self-governing

teams. Most of the work appears in sociology and political science, where the phenomena of

egalitarian and democratic societies, social movements, and citizen voice are of great interest.

Research evidence in support of the commitment advantages of self-governing teams

emphasizes the unusual longevity and low turnover of some examples, combined with a long

waiting list of candidates who wish to join and high selectivity of induction processes. The

research on worker cooperatives, for example, emphasizes the sizeable differences between such

39    

organizations and traditional businesses in worker commitment, and behavioral evidence for

such commitment such as low turnover and absenteeism (Oliver, 1984; Rhodes & Steers, 1981).

Similarly, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra are member-led

performing ensembles of long duration, in which individual commitment and satisfaction are

notably elevated above that of similar manager-led ensembles (Judy, 1999; Hackman, 2002;

Stearns, 2002).

In each of these instances deeply shared values both around the purposes of the

organization and around its determination to maintain democratic practices serves to elevate a

lasting commitment to keeping the entity thriving. Research on these groups emphasizes that

self-governing entities offer both extensive participation in making critical decisions that affect

members’ own lives and work (Bart, 1995; Pearce, Rubenfeld & Morgan, 1991; Whyte, 1991)

and offers membership that is based on deeply shared values (Benai, Niremberg & Menachem,

2000; Campbell, Keen, Norman, & Oakshott, 1977; Whyte, 1991).

Providing leadership for complex societal problems. Much has been written in

sociology about self-governing teams, though not under that term: typically, such groups are part

of civic organizations or are leading social movements, or are termed volunteer groups. This

research stream emphasizes the prevalence and value of such groups in public life. Self-

governing teams have significant benefits, for example, when complex problems require the

resources and capabilities of multiple, independent entities, a kind of problem that is increasing

in prevalence in the world (Sayles & Chandler, 2009). In the public sector and in civic life, for

instance, we are beginning to see an increase in climate-related crises like flooded cities,

droughts, severe wildfires, oil spills, and epidemics, which are creating the necessity for cross-

entity and cross-sector collaborations with people working together from municipalities, NGOs,

40    

and the private sector, all with critical leadership roles in the process. These multi-stakeholder

collaborations require active coordination, and they benefit from shared authority held by

members appointed from relevant stakeholder groups. These individuals form complex

leadership teams, with shared authority to govern the action (Mendonca, Beroggi, & Wallace,

2001; Sayles & Chandler, 2009; Leonard & Howitt, 2006).

Similarly, self-governing teams are taking on problems in civic life for which there is no

single institutional accountability, such as promoting conservation and “green” activity among

citizens or protecting shared public lands. Civic associations are entities that have volunteer

members, are governed by elected leaders, and pursue public voice as a core organizational

outcome (Skocpol & Fiorina, 1999). Many teams operate within large civic associations, but

nevertheless hold authority to decide the unique focus of their teams. The volunteer leaders in

civic associations fulfill essential functions by mobilizing others both to devise and to implement

collective strategies. Leadership tasks include motivating people to work together, dealing

strategically with a range of external threats and opportunities, and adapting to the novel and

challenging circumstances that accompany the work of advocacy (Campbell, 2005; Day, 2000;

Morris & Staggenborg, 2004).

These governance groups have the ability to develop context-specific strategies to solve

unique local problems. For example, in a longitudinal study of leadership teams in a U.S. civic

association whose purpose is to mobilize volunteers to protect the natural environment, Ganz and

Wageman (2008) found that teams that were better able to articulate and define genuinely shared

purposes among diverse and independent members were better able to mobilize others to

accomplish collective aims. Relatedly, Ostrom's (1990; Ostrom & Gardner, 1994) ground-

breaking research identifying the conditions under which communities avoid the tragedy of the

41    

commons shows repeatedly the necessity of community self-governing leadership teams for

sustainable agreements. Self-convened, community-authorized and representative leadership

teams are a key design principle for using and preserving publicly held goods such as forests,

fisheries, and grazing land (Ostrom, 1990).

Challenges for Self-Governing Teams

While the great strengths and potential of self-governing teams are compelling, it is also

the case that such teams struggle with significant challenges to their effectiveness. In particular,

there are three relative weaknesses of such teams compared to those in which individuals hold

some authority over purposes and processes: (a) articulating purposes is not a natural team task;

(b) emphasis on consensus elicits the worst dysfunctions of group decision making and (c) as a

consequence of struggles for clarity and consensus, these teams risk devolving into hierarchies or

disbanding.

Articulating purpose collaboratively. Clear, shared purpose, which is an essential

condition for team effectiveness, is not a strength of this authority structure. Self-governing

teams can struggle to arrive at a sharp enough direction statement to guide collective action.

Further, defining and clarifying the purpose drawing on multiple perspectives is often a

particularly difficult challenge for very diverse groups like the multi-stakeholder leadership

teams described above. Articulating purpose is not a function that is well-executed by groups,

but is rather done more effectively by individuals with considerable conceptualization ability and

dexterity with language (Hackman, 2002, pp. 224-225). In the study of activist teams described

earlier (Wageman & Hackman, 2010), clarity of team purpose was significantly lower for the

self-governing environmental activist teams than for any other kinds of front-line task

42    

performing teams or for senior leadership teams, all of which typically have purposes established

by an individual.

Self-governing teams often have lofty but abstract aspirations and values. This lack of

clarity about where the team is headed can spawn an inability of such teams to reach any

agreement on key decisions or to make well-coordinated strategic choices when team members

are not together. Hackman (2002) describes, for example, a small cooperative newspaper, in

which members of the cooperative were personally committed to the values of democracy and

wanted to enact those values by involving all members in setting aspirations. In spite of

considerable time and energy invested in the debate, they were never able to reach agreement on

a sharp collective purpose concrete enough to guide behavior. Because decisions about purpose

always involve choosing not to do some things as well as what the team will do, articulating a

direction together requires members to forgo goals that some deem personally valuable

(Hackman, 2002). The expression “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” is about this

very issue: the tendency of peer groups to sand down the sharpest edges of individuals' visions in

the interest of including all their personal goals.

In her classic article “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Freeman (1973) underscores

how a norm of organic growth and egalitarianism in self-governing entities may work to

counteract the efforts of any individual to create necessary structures that might support

collective action. And when the ensuing chaos and disorientation prevent groups from

accomplishing their purposes, there can be a sharp inclination to swing the pendulum in the

opposite direction, establishing rigid structures and a return to hierarchy as a means of creating

clarity.

Promoting a decision-making repertoire beyond consensus. Self-governing teams are

43    

much more likely than other kinds of teams to hold ideologies that insist on democratic

processes. They are much more insistent on seeking consensus than groups in which some

authority is held by an individual (who might, for example, use his or her authority to decide

when it is time to acknowledge the impossibility of consensus and call for a majority vote). As a

consequence, they are especially vulnerable to the dysfunctions of consensus decision-making

processes that are well-documented in teams. Much of the research on groups in the last 50

years has, in one way or another, underscored the problems that arise when groups of peers are

asked to make decisions together. Evidence from juries, real or mock, who are obligated by law

to reach consensus, (Bray, 1978; MacCoun, 1989; Penrod & Hastie, 1980; Sommers, 2006), and

scores of different kinds of problem-solving groups formed in the laboratory (Hollingshead,

1996; Stasser, 1985; Van de Ven & DelBeq, 1974;) all illustrate an array of ways in which the

social processes in groups of peers systematically lead them away from the norm of rational

decision-making.

Consensus processes can result in phenomena such as group polarization—that is, the

tendency for consensus groups to make either riskier or more conservative decisions than is

warranted (Isenberg, 1986; Mackie, 1986). They also induce over-attending to shared

information at the expense of unique relevant information (Stasser, 1985). They can result in

dominance by individuals with higher-status demographic characteristics instead of recognizing

most-knowledgeable members (Hollingshead, 1986), and are also vulnerable to some forms of

Groupthink (Leana, 1985), which refers to an over-focus on agreement and smoothness of

process at the expense of critical evaluation of alternatives.

It is important to note that some studies show that these negative patterns are exacerbated

by the presence of a strong leader relative to true self-governing teams (Hollingshead, 1986;

44    

Janis, 1971; Mullen, Anthony, Salas, and Driskell, 1994). The critical relevance of these

processes to self-governing teams is not that they are especially dysfunctional for such teams, but

rather the special challenges to overcoming them in such authority structures. While each of

these dysfunctions of consensus decision-making can be overcome by the introduction of

structured processes designed to combat them (Van de Ven & DelBeq, 1974), creating and using

a structured decision-making process is not a natural act in peer groups. The presence of an

individual authority—absent in self-governing groups—can increase the chances that a team will

use a well-structured process. As they grow, many self-governing entities such as kibbutzim,

worker cooperatives, and performance ensembles develop electoral processes to create

leadership groups that are small enough to make decisions dexterously in comparison to large

groups, but they still involve consensus processes within those groups (Hahnel, 2005;

Mansbridge, 1980).

How might self-governing groups go about creating for themselves the kinds of

structured decision-making processes that help diminish the dysfunctions of natural group

processes without resorting to non-democratic processes or removing the interaction among

members altogether (as is frequently done in such structured processes as the Nominal Group

Technique; Van de Ven & DelBeq, 1974)? One possibility is for individual members to exercise

leadership by taking responsibility for proposing such a process. But in the Wageman and Ganz

(2008) study cited earlier, the self-governing teams of environmental activists held widely shared

norms of equality which militated against members claiming the authority to intervene in team

processes. It may be something of an art to act as a peer and still engage the group in enacting

effectively structured team processes, neither usurping authority one does not have nor

abdicating responsibility for creating the conditions for effective teamwork. It remains an

45    

important and under-researched question how self-governing teams can make collective

decisions without losing their self-governing character.

Preventing devolution into hierarchy. Some scholars have argued that the very

egalitarian nature of self-governing groups is something of an unnatural act for humans.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that one product of human biological heritage is the

inevitability of hierarchies whenever groups form. The logic is that individuals that win a

competition for dominance in groups, though they also pay costs for it, have a better chance to

pass their genes on to the next generation. The formation of hierarchies in social species is seen

in creatures from insects to primates, and is considerably more common than equality of status

among con-specifics (Cowlishaw & Dunbar, 1991; Ellis, 1995). Self-governing teams have all

the authority they possibly could need to chart their own course and to shape their own structure

and context. But authority dynamics within a team can compromise members’ ability to take

concerted collective action. We already have addressed the difficulty of articulating purpose

collectively. Observers of social experiments like communes and cooperative business

organizations underscore the slow pace of decision making in large groups, and the crisis-

management literature emphasizes a powerful tendency for groups to short cut collective

processes under stress and rely on individual authority (Boehm, 1989; Burke & Greenstein,

1989; Howitt & Leonard, 2006; Lagadec, 1990; Meyers, 1987; Smart & Stanbury, 1978). Self-

governing groups frequently struggle to maintain egalitarian practices that allow the group to

fulfill critical leadership functions in a concerted manner. Relatively little research has

addressed the conditions under which groups are able to maintain their egalitarian authority

structure and make rapid and well-coordinated shifts in action when the environment demands

responsiveness. Is a true sharing of power a stable arrangement, or are certain kinds of

46    

asymmetries necessary for groups’ long-term existence? One fruitful avenue for future research,

then, is the kinds of collective processes—and the kinds of leadership actions that might develop

them—that enable members of self-governing groups to sustain their unique democratic

character.

Imperatives for shared leadership. The challenges of leadership of self-governing

teams are primarily about members developing certain habits and capacities, sharing

responsibility for noticing what critical team leadership functions are not yet being fulfilled and

taking responsibility to fulfill them. There are two particular aspects of self-governing team

functioning that are worth explicit attention by team members, precisely because the automatic

processes that emerge in teams of peers around these matters are likely to be ineffective. These

are (a) paying explicit attention to what is done by the team as compared with what is attended to

by individuals working independently of one another, and (b) creating structured decision

processes that support effective shared information processing and democratic decision making.

Identify what individuals are good for... as well as what teams are good for. In a

field study of student project teams, Wageman & Gordon (2005) showed that teams operate on

“autopilot” when it comes to determining what is done as a whole group and what is done by

individuals working independently of one another. This automaticity, driven by shared values in

the group, frequently resulted in poor task-process fit, in which whole groups, for example, sat

around reading materials together in silence, or groups disaggregated writing tasks that required

coherence and a single voice. Egalitarian groups in particular were especially likely to miss

opportunities to assign to individuals work that is best done independently. The challenge then,

for the leadership of self-governing teams and their tendency toward shared responsibilities, is to

identify that handful of team functions that are better served by individuals while keeping for the

47    

group those functions—like creative idea generation and generating commitment to strategic

choices—that belong to the group. The irony is that all the individuals in a self-convened group

must have—or acquire—an understanding of those kinds of choices in order for the group to

evolve excellent self-leadership practices. Some writers in political sociology note that among

the institutions that best help individuals acquire these skills in public life—civic and religious

volunteer organizations—are declining, rather than increasing, in prevalence (Putnam, 1994). It

remains an important question how the essential skills of self-governance can be developed and

transmitted in ways that enable self-governing teams to be maximally effective in addressing

their core purposes.

Create norms of shared accountability for devising and self-assessing structured

processes. Well-designed teams develop norms of attentiveness to changes in environmental

demands, and they craft and execute task performance strategies that are fully appropriate to

their task and situation, rather than fall mindlessly into the execution of habitual routines

(Gersick & Hackman, 1994; Wageman, 1995, 2001). Such norms are likely to emerge naturally

when the tasks undertaken by the team are meaningful and when team purposes are clear

(Wageman, 2001). But self-governing teams need additional attention to norms about behavior

to help them deal constructively with the authority dynamics and challenges of democratic

processes that make collective decision-making difficult. For self-managing teams, the

usefulness of coaching the team process has been well-established. But in such teams the

responsibility to introduce and coach effective processes is squarely placed on a clear team

leader. For self-governing teams, widely shared norms of equality can militate against members

claiming the authority to intervene in team processes. Member coaching of team processes is by

no means impossible, but requires explicit conversation, initiated by members themselves, to get

48    

in place. The establishment of shared responsibility for intervening in team processes may be a

critical norm to establish at the launch of a self-governing team, increasing the chances that the

kinds of interventions typically the domain of a single leader may be taken up by multiple

members in turn.

Directions for Future Research

The recent explosion in the number of self-governing teams is only beginning to attract

the attention of teams researchers. There is much descriptive work to be done on the

phenomenon, as well as the development of normative theories of effectiveness. First, it would

be intriguing to explore the question of for what kinds of purposes do self-governing groups

typically convene. Given the complete authority to form teams for any purpose, what are the

arenas in which we see people deciding that more typical organizational arrangements are

underserving some need, or offering little opportunity to engage with others for a given purpose?

There are many research frontiers available for studying self-governing teams. We have

identified a number of normative questions that are relatively under-explored for such teams:

Under what conditions do self-governing teams make excellent collaborative decisions in line

with their own self-defined purposes? Under what conditions do such teams revert to hierarchies

instead of maintaining collective self-governance, and avoid the perverse consequences of that

reversion? Do self-governing teams that develop norms of shared responsibility for intervening

in team process at launch outperform and outlast those that don’t? Under what conditions are

members able to sustain collective self-governance and create alignment across multiple such

teams? What are the critical challenges to self-formed and self-determining teams in developing

their own capacity to learn?

49    

If teams researchers are to address these modern phenomena in team formation and

leadership, we will need new ways of thinking about different antecedents to their internal

processes (e.g., there are no external leaders whose actions or styles we can study, there is no

organizational evaluation, reward or training system to assess). And we will need new ways of

thinking about team processes, such as team self-formation and launch processes, inter-team

governance processes, and multilevel (individual and team) learning processes, to name a few.

Finally, we will need to evolve new or less common ways of studying teams—identifying them

when they are born online, finding them outside organizational boundaries, observing them in

real time—to begin getting a handle on what the future holds for such teams.

Conclusion

The teams research literature, when seen through the lens of the authority structure within

which teams operate, offers a clearly differentiated set of opportunities and challenges for those

who would exercise leadership of teams. As we have seen, authority structure influences the

exercise of leadership in teams in two important ways: (a) constraining who can lead, and (b)

creating particular virtues and weaknesses in the team that open the door for leadership activity

to have important impacts on team effectiveness.

First, authority structure constrains who is likely to be able to have impact on team

effectiveness, because it specifies the groups and individuals who have legitimate authority to

fulfill certain leadership functions. For example, in manager-led teams, the ability of team

members to exercise leadership over some of the most important influences on team

effectiveness—such as team membership and the process by which the work gets done—is

severely constrained. By contrast, in self-governing teams members have all the authority they

50    

need to influence any aspect of team functioning.

But each of these levels of constraint places specific requirements on those who would

exercise leadership. In the first instance, the manager of the team has a particular leadership

burden that arises directly from the fact that only he or she can decide work processes, and that is

to take steps to manage the motivation losses for the team that are inherent in low-autonomy

work. For the self-governing team, a consequence of that shared leadership responsibility is that

members have upon them a requirement to exercise leadership around managing the authority

dynamics and challenges of democratic processes. In other words, the authority structure itself

results in the need to exercise leadership for particular purposes.

We can summarize for each authority structure both the key leadership requirements and

the functions that are likely to be in especially good shape, without much intervention, as a result

of how authority is partitioned. To do so, it is useful to draw upon three key team processes that

together influence the performance effectiveness of teams. Hackman and Wageman (2005)

posited that team effectiveness is a joint function of three performance processes: (a) the level of

effort group members collectively expend carrying out task work, (b) the appropriateness to the

task of the performance strategies the group uses in its work, and (c) the amount of knowledge

and skill members bring to bear on the task. In other words, to the degree that the conditions

under which a team work elicit and reinforce high levels of collective energy and attention to the

work, enable and support superb strategizing, and result in high levels of knowledge and skill

being developed and deployed to do the work, they are almost certainly going to perform their

work well. The authority structures we have explored in this chapter have some direct effects on

these team processes and, as a consequence, direct the leadership needs of the team to particular

functions—e.g., enhancing motivation or managing knowledge and skill levels—while others

51    

will be well fulfilled without direct intervention either by a formal leader or by members

themselves.

For manager-led teams, the leadership requirements are considerable and constant: acting in

ways that can sustain effort, given the low autonomy of such teams, providing the strategic

direction for the group, and compensating for and building the capabilities of low-skill members.

For self-managing teams, the leadership requirements to manage these processes shifts to

members themselves, and the formal team leader can support them through coaching. The

increase in work autonomy makes the burden of motivating the group less onerous, but the

demand to attend to creating interdependent structures that promote team decision-making,

providing hands-on coaching, and promoting a focus on external constituencies grows.

For self-designing teams, the leadership functions demanded of the team members expands

to include attentiveness to managing knowledge and skill—understanding the necessary

capabilities and resources to do their work well, and developing their own members, because

they hold the authority and therefore the responsibility to compose the team and structure its

work. At the same time they also tend to have much more impact on their own motivation,

because they collectively share responsibility for how rewards, punishments, and other extrinsic

consequences are allocated to members. Formal leaders can be especially helpful to such teams

in taking off their plates the responsibility to manage all external relations and obtain and

synthesize information that the team can use. Perhaps most critically, formal leaders can help

keep collective purposes clear while the team members themselves attend to a complex array of

leadership functions to support their own work.

Finally, self-governing teams that define their purposes well have little reason to need to

exercise leadership deliberately to enhance effort levels—the combination of work autonomy,

52    

shared rewards and purpose-values fit is a recipe for high motivation. They do, however, have

the added burden of fulfilling certain key leadership functions collectively—like defining shared

purposes and being explicit about their decision rules—at which teams do not often excel. And

so appointing particular individuals to take on certain leadership functions for the team at certain

times—that is, the internal authority structure—becomes part of their required leadership

functions as well.

In this chapter we provide guidance about the tradeoffs inherent in each team authority

structure and outline the key demands for leadership that are created by those structures. We

hope this chapter gives practitioners and scholars a way to identify both (a) the tradeoffs in a

particular situation to choose an authority structure, and (b) the ways in which members and

formal leaders may effectively operate within that structure.

There remain three significant research questions identified by this approach that have yet to

addressed. We end by summarizing them here. (1) What are the conditions under which

particular authority structures are most effective for conducting collaborative work? We know

very little about that question from empirical research. What little research that has been done to

directly address it shows that self-managing teams generally produce superior outcomes on all

three criteria of effectiveness compared to manager-led teams, at least when the conditions have

been created for formerly manager-led teams to operate in a genuinely self-managing fashion. It

remains an open question and one worthy of additional research about when each of the types of

teams we have addressed here is most effective—and for what outcomes of interest. That is,

while the demands of functioning in a self-designing teams may be especially enabling of

individual team members’ leadership capacities, such authority structures may be less able to

promote decision-making speed. This observation suggests a further research question: (2)

53    

Under what conditions are particular authority structures for teams chosen or enacted? How

common are each of the types, and in what organizational or societal circumstances? For

example, while we suspect that self-designing teams are increasing in prevalence in workplaces,

and that that increase almost certainly reflects a perceived need for teams to have more authority

over their own membership and context than they have in the past, we know very little about

what the underlying challenges are that such teams address. Finally, (3) what is the process by

which team authority structures are determined? Our review of the existing literature suggests

that authority dynamics in teams are, indeed, dynamic—that is, in many circumstances they

represent a complex negotiation and structuration process over time (Poole & McFee, 2005),

with formal leaders’ explicit choices, team members’ interactions, and other systemic features all

interacting to shape the emergent authority structure under which teams operate.

We hope the framework and analysis provided in this chapter offer a starting point for such

explorations and a structure for identifying the conditions under which different team authority

structures emerge over time and are especially effective for different purposes.

54    

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Manager'led*+Self'managing*+*******+

Self'designing*+*******+

Figure'1:'Levels'of'Team'Authority7

Self'governing*+

Team’s'Responsibility7

Set'overall'purposes7

Design'the'team'and'shape'member'roles7

Monitor'and'manage'work'processes7

Execute'the'team'task7

Level*1+ Level*2+ Level*3+ Level*4+

Manager’s'Responsibility7