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Today's top executives are expected to do everything right, from coming up with solutions to unfathomably complex problems to having the charisma and prescience to rally stakeholders around a perfect vision of the future. But no one leader can be all things to all people. It's time to end the myth of the complete leader, say the authors. Those at the top must come to understand their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Only by embracing the ways in which they are incomplete can leaders fill in the gaps in their knowledge with others' skills. The incomplete leader has the confidence and humility to recognize unique talents and perspectives throughout the organization--and to let those qualities shine. The authors' work studying leadership over the past six years has led them to develop a framework of distributed leadership. Within that model, leadership consists of four capabilities: sensemaking, relating, "visioning," and inventing. Sensemaking involves understanding and mapping the context in which a company and its people operate. A leader skilled in this area can quickly identify the complexities of a given situation and explain them to others. The second capability, relating, means being able to build trusting relationships with others through inquiring (listening with intention), advocating (explaining one's own point of view), and connecting (establishing a network of allies who can help a leader accomplish his or her goals). Visioning, the third capability, means coming up with a compelling image of the future. It is a collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create. Finally, inventing involves developing new ways to bring that vision to life. Rarely will a single person be skilled in all four areas. That's why it's critical that leaders find others who can offset their limitations and complement their strengths. Those who don't will not only bear the burden of leadership alone but will find themselves at the helm of an unbalanced ship.

The functional perspective is a normative approach to describing and predicting group performance that focuses on the functions of inputs and/or processes. The aim of theory and research from this perspective is to understand why some groups are successful and others are not. This article investigates theory and, to a lesser extent, research of small groups based on the functional perspective. The authors present the underlying theoretical assumptions and review theories that fit into the functional perspective from several representative areas of research. They conclude by outlining notable strengths and weaknesses associated with viewing groups from this perspective and propose some directions for future theory development.

The article discusses the issue of time as it pertains to organizational research. The author believes that looking at research in terms of time is a powerful tool in assessing organizational phenomena. According to the author, temporal research allows researchers to gain more perspective when looking at organizational issues such as decision making, group performance and organizational transformation. The author notes that the field of temporal research is translated into concepts including pacing, timing and sequencing.

This paper applies the biological concept of entrainment to organization theory. Three types of entrainment are identified: tempo, synchronic, and harmonic. Hypotheses are presented and it is argue...

Using a sample of forty-five new product teams this study examines how groups interact with their organizational environment. Four key activity sets were identified: ambassador, task coordinator, s...

Using an external perspective as a research lens, this study examined team-context interaction in five consulting teams. The data revealed three strategies toward the teams' environment: informing, parading, and probing. Informing teams remain relatively isolated from their environment; parading teams have high levels of passive observation of the environment; and probing teams actively engage outsiders. Probing teams revise their knowledge of the environment through external contact, initiate programs with outsiders, and promote their team's achievements within their organization. In this study, they were rated as the highest performers among the teams, although member satisfaction and cohesiveness suffered in the short run. Results suggested that external activities are better predictors of team performance than internal group processes for teams facing external dependence.

Previous research suggests that teams pace their change either internally to coincide with the midpoint, deadline, or task phases, or externally by entraining to exogenous pacers. Other research suggests that teams adapt to random environmental shocks. This paper investigates if, how, and when endogenous, exogenous, and random pacers affect the patterns of change in groups. We studied five software development teams during a turbulent two-year period. Our case studies and supporting analyses suggest that teams perform a “dance of entrainment”—simultaneously creating multiple rhythms and choreographing their activities to mesh with different pacers at different times.

The “kiddie corps” team at Microsoft worked long and hard (Newsweek, February 24, 2003) to come up with a new software product called three degrees. Tammy Savage and her team realized that Microsoft was not meeting the needs of the 13 to 24 set and came up with some ideas. Selling these to the top brass was not easy. Bill Gates was not that interested, but finally another top manager gave them his support. The team brought a set of college students together and asked them to work on a business plan-not because they were interested in the plan, but because they were interested in how they used technology as they worked together. After a week they understood a lot more. Thus began the development and production of three degrees. The team got a new space and many new members. They looked around to find out how products had been developed before, borrowed lots of ideas from others, and built on what they learned. They worked through many technical glitches and internal disagreements. Yet in the end, they brought the product to market.

This chapter discusses theory and research on small groups from the functional perspective. We define, present the underlying theoretical assumptions of, and review seven representative areas of research from the functional perspective. The seven areas include group decision-making, social combination approach, groupthink, collective information sharing, group brainstorming, conflict management, and an external view of groups. Our review of research from the functional perspective also covers how group composition, projects, structures, and ecology affect group interactions and outcomes. The functional perspective is strong in predicting and explaining task-oriented group performance but is more limited in predicting and explaining the behavior of groups with socioemotional or multiple goals outside normative boundaries. We present other debates and challenges to the functional perspective and suggest future research directions.

This chapter examines the relationship between team routines and temporal entrainment. While the process of entrainment generally reinforces the routines that teams follow temporal entrainment also creates opportunities for externally focused teams to change their routines. Entrainment creates team rhythms that include pauses in activity that can act as triggers to change. These pauses alone are not enough to impel teams to change; managers must also employ temporal design to make use of these opportunities for change. Both the rhythms of temporal entrainment and the pauses that accompany them are part of a team’s task environment. By uncovering key rhythms, as well as by managing the pauses, managers can both reinforce desired routines and change problematic ones.

The concept of sustainability is an evolving one driven by many factors. While business organizations face risks if they ignore the social, political and regulatory shifts that accompany the moveme...

In this dissertation, I study the factors that influence the performance of short-term teams engaged in an entrepreneurial activity. This is an important area to study because team-started businesses account for a disproportionately greater number of high-growth firms (Kamm, Shuman and Seeger, 1990). Unfortunately, there has been limited research on team started businesses. The entrepreneurial teams that I study are participants in the MIT $50K Business Plan Competition. This sample is chosen because business plan competitions are increasingly becoming the meeting place for new ideas, people interested in starting business ventures and others who are interested in participating in these ventures (e.g., patent attorneys, investors and venture capitalists). In addition, the sample overcomes some problems typical of many entrepreneurship studies including left censoring biases, population identification and low response rates. Chapter 1 is an overview of the thesis while chapter 2 describes the entrepreneurial activities at MIT. Chapter 3 describes the MIT $50K Business Plan Competition and elaborates the steps taken to collect information from competition participants. Since entrepreneurial team performance is influenced by factors both internal and external to the team, this thesis takes a comprehensive approach, presenting three papers that explore the effects of team composition, team design and external contacts on entrepreneurial team performance. Both external and team-member evaluations of entrepreneurial team performance are used. Both evaluations are important because positive external evaluations can increase the venture's chances of getting resources (e.g., Roberts, 1991a) while positive internal evaluations can increase the chance that members will be satisfied with their teams and continue in team involvement (e.g., Hackman, 1987). The first paper, described in chapter 4, explores the influence of team design, both team structure and member interaction, o, By Maw-Der Foo., Ph. D.

We present a model that examines the structural characteristics of an employee identity system that can reduce escalation of commitment to a failing course of action or, entrapment. We propose that...

The increasing reliance on teams in organizations raises the question of how these teams should be formed. Should they be formed completely of engineers or should they include a range of specialists? Should they be made up to people who have long tenure in the organization, or those with a wide range of experience? As teams increasingly get called upon to do more complex tasks and to cross functional boundaries within the organization, conventional wisdom has suggested that teams be composed of more diverse members. This study suggests that the answer may not be so simple. Using 409 individuals from 45 new product teams in five high-technology companies, this study investigates the impact of diversity on team performance. We found that functional and tenure diversity each has its own distinct effects. The greater the functional diversity, the more team members communicated outside the team's boundaries. This communication was with a variety of groups such as marketing, manufacturing, and top management. The more the external communication, the higher the managerial ratings of innovation. Tenure diversity had its impact on internal group dynamics rather than external communications. Tenure diversity is associated with improved task work such as clarifying group goals and setting priorities. In turn, this clarity is associated with high team ratings of overall performance. Yet diversity is not solely positive. While it does produce internal processes and external communications that facilitate performance, it also directly impedes performance. That is, overall the effect of diversity on performance is negative, even though some aspects of group work are enhanced. It may be that for these teams diversity brings more creativity to problem solving and product development, but it impedes implementation because there is less capability for teamwork than there is for homogeneous teams. These research findings suggest that simply changing the structure of teams (i.e. combining representatives of diverse function and tenure) will not improve performance. The team must find a way to garner the positive process effects of diversity and to reduce the negative direct effects. At the team level, greater negotiation and conflict resolution skills may be necessary. At the organization level, the team may need to be protected from external political pressures and rewarded for team, rather than functional, outcomes.

Research on time in organizations spans disciplines and introduces a wide range of concepts. Here we set out to find an underlying structure to clarify the current state of temporal research. Our examination yields three categories of variables: conceptions of time, mapping activities to time, and actors relating to time. We elaborate intricacies within each category, interrelationships among categories, and assumptions made in each category about the others. We then use the framework to compare existing studies and generate propositions to develop the notion of temporal fit.

(1990). Improving the Performance of New Product Teams. Research-Technology Management: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 25-29.