Wendy P. van Ginkel’s research while affiliated with Drexel University and other places

Shared leadership, team members collectively leading the team, has developed from a new perspective on team leadership to an established area of research. As the evidence of the effectiveness of shared leadership accumulates, it comes increasingly into focus that we lack theory about the dynamic interplay of shared leadership and vertical leadership – the leadership by the individual formally assigned to lead the team. The absence of such theory is problematic because vertical leadership is a continuing presence in the shared leadership process and, to be effective, vertical leadership should arguably both influence and be influenced by shared leadership. Linear models in which vertical leadership is treated as a predictor of shared leadership without taking this dynamic into account fall short of capturing how vertical and shared leadership work in conjunction. We propose theory to address this, outlining how vertical leadership can develop, maintain, and complement shared leadership in a process in which shared and vertical leadership coevolve as they influence each other. We identify an internal role for vertical leadership in stimulating the development and maintenance of team cognition for shared leadership, guiding the team in shared leadership, and engendering team reflexivity to learn from the experience with shared leadership, and an external role in complementing shared leadership through boundary spanning to connect the team to its external environment. As shared leadership develops over time, it influences these vertical leadership behaviors, such that vertical leadership evolves as shared leadership evolves. Plain Language Summary Title Shared leadership in teams: the role of the formal team leader.

The trouble with teams is that we need them, and the leadership that makes teams tick. Teams have become ubiquitous within the organizational landscape. They are deployed to address cutting-edge knowledge work and develop breakthrough innovation. Getting the most out of teams requires that they, to a large degree, lead themselves. Simultaneously, their efforts must be embedded within the larger organizational context, which typically requires vertical leadership from a hierarchical source. In addition, however, true team leadership generally also requires team member-based shared leadership from the team itself. Our curated collection of Academy of Management publications on team leadership illustrates how team leadership research has developed over time. This development includes the application of leadership models that are not specific to teams, as well as team-specific leadership theory. We discuss the value of both. We also highlight arguably the most important direction in developing the field: studying team leadership as a dynamic process in which formal, vertical leadership and informal, shared leadership mutually influence each other. We discuss how pursuing this direction requires the development of new theory and new empirical approaches that capture dynamics over time. Ultimately, it is time for a course correction in team leadership research.

Team diversity research has established that diversity has the potential to stimulate synergetic performance outcomes through information integration processes, but also has the potential to invite interpersonal tensions that disrupt the very information integration process that can give more diverse teams an advantage over more homogeneous teams. A focus on the role of team leadership in stimulating information integration processes and preempting interpersonal tensions is obvious and important, but surprisingly underdeveloped conceptually and empirically. In this article, we integrate insights from two complementary perspectives on leadership and diversity—inclusive leadership and leadership for diversity mindsets—to advance a more integrative perspective on how team leadership can stimulate both inclusion and synergy from diversity.

Intergroup knowledge integration, that is the acquisition, processing, and utilization of knowledge across group boundaries, is a critical source of competitive advantage in modern organizations. Prior research has highlighted the important role of boundary spanning knowledge exchange for intergroup knowledge integration, neglecting, however, the question of what makes individual boundary spanners more effective in fostering intergroup knowledge integration. Integrating boundary spanning literature with theories of group information processing, we hypothesize that the effect of individual boundary spanning ties on intergroup knowledge integration depends on the boundary spanners’ levels of metaknowledge, i.e., knowledge of who knows what in their respective groups, and proactivity. We find general support for our predictions in a study of 457 engineering consultants nested in 22 interdependent business units within an organization. Additional criterion analyses confirm the material importance of intergroup knowledge integration for group performance. Our findings have implications for literatures on intergroup effectiveness, team cognition, and proactivity.

With growing nationality diversity in organizations, the question under which circumstances differences in nationality background between team members affect individual performance increases in importance. Research showed that dissimilarity may negatively affect individual performance and that the status difference between nationality majority and nationality minority moderates this effect. We take this analysis an important step further by recognizing that not all nationality minorities are low status and propose that status differences among nationality minority groups influence the extent to which nationality minority background affects individual performance. We identify the elaboration of distributed information in the team as a mediator and process accountability as a moderator in this effect. Results of a multilevel team experiment in which we manipulated team nationality composition and process accountability supported our hypotheses, testifying to the value of status‐based distinctions between minority groups in the study of relational demography effects. The mediating role of the elaboration of distributed information also provides an important bridge to team diversity research inviting further conceptual integration.

Empowering leadership is an important influence on team effectiveness. This makes the question of what the antecedents of team empowering leadership are an important issue to consider. To address this question, we propose a motivated information processing perspective that holds that engaging in empowering leadership is based on social information processing, and that there are individual differences in how elaborate that information processing is. We argue that a key consideration in shifting control from the leader to the team is the extent to which empowering leadership is driven by leaders’ consideration of their trust in the team (i.e., an instance of social information processing), and that leader need for closure (a trait capturing the disposition to carefully consider decisions and actions) moderates the relationship between leader trust in team and empowering leadership. A survey of N = 156 work teams supported these hypotheses.

Attaining value from nationality diversity requires active diversity management, which organizations often employ in the form of diversity training programs. Interestingly, however, the previously reported effects of diversity training are often weak and, sometimes, even negative. This situation calls for research on the conditions under which diversity training helps or harms teams. We propose that diversity training can increase team creativity, but only for teams with less positive pretraining diversity beliefs (i.e., teams with a greater need for such training) and that are sufficiently diverse in nationality. Comparing the creativity of teams that attended nationality diversity training versus control training, we found that for teams with less positive diversity beliefs, diversity training increased creative performance when the team's nationality diversity was high, but undermined creativity when the team's nationality diversity was low. Diversity training had less impact on teams with more positive diversity beliefs, and training effects were not contingent upon these teams' diversity. Speaking to the underlying process, we showed that these interactive effects were driven by the experienced team efficacy of the team members. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for nationality diversity management. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).