IT'S NOT JUST WHAT IS SAID, BUT WHEN IT'S SAID: A TEMPORAL ACCOUNT OF VERBAL BEHAVIORS AND EMERGENT LEADERSHIP IN SELF-MANAGED TEAMS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gerpott, Fabiola H.; Lehmann-Willenbrock, Nale; Voelpel, Sven C.; Van Vugt, Mark
• 署名单位: WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management; University of Hamburg; Constructor University; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• 刊物名称: ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-4273
• DOI: 10.5465/amj.2017.0149
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 717-738
• 关键词: AUTONOMOUS WORK TEAMS; CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP; decision-making; time; performance; COMMUNICATION; transitions; substitutes; personality; GENDER

摘要

Emergent leadership-the ascription of informal leadership responsibilities among team members-is a dynamic phenomenon that comes into place through social interactions. Yet, theory remains sparse about the importance of verbal behaviors for emergent leadership in self-managed teams over a team's lifecycle. Adopting a functional perspective on leadership, we develop a temporal account that links changes in task-, change-, and relations-oriented communication to emergent leadership in early, middle, and late team phases. We test the hypothesized relationships in 42 teams that provided round-robin emergent leadership ratings and videotapes of their first, midterm, and final meetings. Team members' verbal behaviors were captured using fine-grained empirical interaction coding. Multilevel modeling showed that task- oriented communication was a stable positive predictor of emergent leadership at all time points. Change-oriented communication predicted emergent leadership at the start of a project and diminished in relevance at the midterm and final meetings. Relations-oriented communication gained importance, such that an increase in relations-oriented behaviors toward the project end predicted emergent leadership. We discuss theoretical implications for conceptualizing the behavioral antecedents of emergent leadership from a time- and context-sensitive perspective.