Leadership & Teamwork?|My homework helper

Posted: March 15th, 2023

Prior to beginning work on this discussion, read Chapters 5 and 16 in Northouse course text, which focus on situational approaches with leadership and team leadership. Also, read Chapters 2 in Oedekoven et al. course text, which identifies teams, teamwork and leadership styles.

Focus on the Situational Leadership 2 approach. Explain how and when you would use directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating leadership styles to create high performing leadership teams for your organization. Your discussion post should be 250 words.

Chapter 16 Leadership & Teamwork

“Work teams are very prevalent in today’s organizations. The reliance on teams is due partially to increasingly complex tasks, more globalization, and the flattening of organizational structures. A team is a type of organizational group that is composed of members who are interdependent, who share common goals, and who must coordinate their activities to accomplish these goals. Team members must work collectively to achieve their goals. Examples of organizational teams include senior executive teams, project management teams, task forces, work units, standing committees, quality teams, and improvement teams. Teams can be located in the same place meeting face-to-face, or they can be geographically dispersed “virtual” teams meeting across time and distance via various forms of communication technology. Teams can also be hybrids of face-to-face and virtual teams with some members being co-located and some being dispersed. Exactly what defines an organizational group as a team or not is constantly evolving as organizations confront the many new forms of contemporary collaboration (Wageman, Gardner, & Mortensen, 2012).

The study of organizational teams has focused on strategies for maintaining a competitive advantage. Team-based organizations have faster response capability because of their flatter organizational structures, which rely on teams and new technology to enable communication across time and space (Porter & Beyerlein, 2000). These newer organizational structures have been referred to as “team-based and technology-enabled” (Mankin, Cohen, & Bikson, 1996).

Before the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally and people were forced to work remotely from their homes, relying on videoconferencing for meetings and engagement, a majority of multinational companies were already depending on virtual teams, or teams that are geographically dispersed and rely on technology to interact and collaborate (Muethel, Gehrlein, & Hoegl, 2012). Such teams allow companies to (1) use the best talent across the globe, (2) facilitate collaboration across time and space, and (3) reduce travel costs (Paul, Drake, & Liang, 2016) and, as experienced during the pandemic, allow organizational work to continue when physical locations are shut down or unavailable. The development of social media, video communication technologies, and software applications for meeting management has given virtual teams richer and more realistic communication environments where collaboration is facilitated (Schmidt, 2014; Schouten, van den Hooff, & Feldberg, 2016; Scott, 2013). Despite this, virtual teams face more difficulty with members separated by time, distance, and culture. In virtual teams, face-to-face communication is rare, with decisions and scheduling taking more time. In addition, they often have less trust, more conflict, and more subgroup formation. Breuer, Hüffmeier, and Hertel (2016) found that trust is an important factor when leading virtual teams because trust has been shown to be more important to virtual teams compared to face-to-face teams.

The Center for Creative Leadership worked with 141 virtual teams around the world and found that three key factors influence the effectiveness of virtual teams (Leslie & Hoole, 2018):

Technology. Effective team leadership uses technology to create connections among team members and make team members feel like they are working face-to-face. The use of videoconferencing (e.g., Zoom) became critical during the COVID-19 pandemic to allow for team success.Managing distance. In many cases, virtual teams work across different time zones, and accommodating differing schedules is important. Virtual team leadership must share the burden of early-morning and late-night meetings among team members so that certain members are not always the ones to accommodate the time zone differences. Physical distance is a challenge to the engagement of team members, and team leaders must work to ensure members’ commitment to team goals.Team structure. Virtual team leadership must carefully consider the members of the team and ensure that those on the team are committed. While this is true for all teams, it is even more critical in a virtual team, since it is easier for team members to “check out.” Often, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, some people were members of many different virtual teams, which resulted in less effort toward any one team and harmed the overall effectiveness.

Whether traditional or virtual, the organizational team-based structure is an important way for organizations to remain competitive by responding quickly and adapting to constant, rapid changes. Studies of both face-to-face and virtual teams have increasingly become focused on team processes and team outcomes (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Thomas, Martin, & Riggio, 2013). Also, researchers focused on the problems work teams confront as well as how to make these work teams more effective (Ilgen, Major, Hollenbeck, & Sego, 1993). Effective organizational teams lead to many desirable outcomes, such as

greater productivity,more effective use of resources,better decisions and problem solving,better-quality products and services, andgreater innovation and creativity (Parker, 1990).”

“Work teams are very prevalent in today’s organizations. The reliance on teams is due partially to increasingly complex tasks, more globalization, and the flattening of organizational structures. A team is a type of organizational group that is composed of members who are interdependent, who share common goals, and who must coordinate their activities to accomplish these goals. Team members must work collectively to achieve their goals. Examples of organizational teams include senior executive teams, project management teams, task forces, work units, standing committees, quality teams, and improvement teams. Teams can be located in the same place meeting face-to-face, or they can be geographically dispersed “virtual” teams meeting across time and distance via various forms of communication technology. Teams can also be hybrids of face-to-face and virtual teams with some members being co-located and some being dispersed. Exactly what defines an organizational group as a team or not is constantly evolving as organizations confront the many new forms of contemporary collaboration (Wageman, Gardner, & Mortensen, 2012).

The study of organizational teams has focused on strategies for maintaining a competitive advantage. Team-based organizations have faster response capability because of their flatter organizational structures, which rely on teams and new technology to enable communication across time and space (Porter & Beyerlein, 2000). These newer organizational structures have been referred to as “team-based and technology-enabled” (Mankin, Cohen, & Bikson, 1996).

SOLUTION

Situational Leadership 2 (SLII) approach is a leadership model developed by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey that emphasizes adapting leadership style to the situation at hand. According to SLII, effective leadership is achieved by matching the leader’s behavior to the readiness or development level of their team members. SLII consists of four leadership styles: directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating, which can be used in different situations to create high-performing teams.