The magazine for alumni and friends of the UB School of Management
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Teamwork to Manage a More Complex World ���Leaders who can overcome their fears and broadcast their feelings as they work through the messy internal growth process will be viewed more favorably by their followers.��� Bradley Owens Assistant Professor Paul Tesluk is an expert on team and organizational effectiveness in addition to leadership development, and has published research exploring the evolving nature of leadership and work in an increasingly globalized world. ���The nature of work is rapidly evolving and characterized more often as knowledge-based, globally distributed and accomplished by bringing together crossfunctional expertise,��� he says. ���Many organizations are shifting their approach to leadership from one that is more hierarchical to one that is more distributed.��� He cites several reasons for this shift, including the increasing complexity and fluidity of work that requires integrating diverse expertise and knowledge across a team; higher reliance on technology to connect people with necessary knowledge and expertise; and generational shifts in values and attitudes about having influence and authority. Tesluk has studied several companies that have successfully implemented a shared leadership structure. ���Shared leadership in teams occurs when there is mutual influence embedded in team member interactions in areas related to direction, motivation and support,��� he says. ���When adequately developed, shared leadership in teams can lead to positive outcomes such as greater collaboration, higher trust, more effective teamwork and more effective application of distributed expertise, all of which in turn contribute to team adaptability.��� However, such a model does not necessarily negate the need for formal team leaders. ���We found that when members of the team engaged in shared leadership, that in order for teams to be adaptive and successfully respond to unanticipated events, the formal team leader needed to provide strong influence,��� Tesluk says. ���In other words, the role of formal team leader shifts from being the one making most or all of the decisions to the one that is helping the team focus and understand the situation at hand.��� Tesluk says that three conditions can support shared leadership: shared purpose (common understanding of the team���s goal and purpose), social support (team members��� efforts to provide emotional and psychological strength to each other) and voice (team members��� input into how the team carries out its purpose). Fred Dansereau, professor, warns that the teamoriented approach to leadership doesn���t always work. Dansereau has been with the School of Management for more than 40 years and has written 80 articles and 11 books on leadership and organizational dynamics. ���It can depend on the industry, the nature of the work flow, the organization���s work processes and the workforce involved,��� he says. The increasingly global nature of business, made possible through mobile and digital technologies, may point toward a model where shared leadership becomes more of the norm. If an organization has corporate offices on one continent and manufacturing operations on another, its leadership will need to learn how to work collaboratively across time zones and cultures. Coming Soon: New Leadership Center The School of Management is developing a new initiative, the Center for Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness, or CLOE for short. CLOE will significantly advance research and teaching in the area of leadership and its impact on organizational effectiveness. It also will support UB 2020���s goals of accelerating academic excellence, translating scholarship and developing leadership capabilities in UB students and business leaders. CLOE will be a means for building a world-class faculty of leadership scholars and will provide ways to work with the business community, as well as with other units across campus. 12 Buffalo Business Spring 2013