Introduction to Team-Leadership Theory
Every single organization needs a team leader who is liable to organize all company processes to perform themselves as a united body. The mechanism of arranging the company performance where all organization participants work collaboratively in order to achieve a final goal of a company adjustment is called team building. Team-building or group development is an essential component of cooperation performance and its further financial abundance. It goes without saying that there is a leader who stands at the head of the team-building process. A team leader is a person who is liable to motivate, promote and encourage their followers to make a cooperation a best-performing brand. Team leadership had several branches to consider and evaluate. The first one is leadership approaches facilitating group formation, and the second one is the team-building frame, its theories, and stages.
Case study: This paper’s research aims at overviewing team leadership patterns that are the basis of the team-building process. Evaluating team leadership theories enables me to assess my leadership performance and the performances of my co-workers. The elaborate analysis of my strengths and areas where I can benefit from developing my team-leadership structure will help me devise a beneficial strategy to form a group where all participants will be motivated. Additionally, to come up with a new incipient plan, I have to evaluate my colleague (leader B) performance, who is my role model to follow. The detailed assessment of leader B is the guideline that might come in handy, as it highlights leader B’s upsides that I can tap into; downsides I can avoid.
Team-leadership and Management Theories
Running a successful, best-performing business implies possessing particular personal aptitudes and characteristics. Company executives might have team leadership makings, management orientations to lead a company and its members into a top competitive position at a vast expanse of rival firms. These two performance components are indispensable parts of a business administration. Two behavioral patterns are significant for a team leader to manifest. They are team-leadership approaches aligned with group-forming; and team-leadership management structure, which is essential for persuading a team leader’s followers to act on their recommendations and instructions.
Team leadership implies personal and informal relationships between a company executive and their subordinates. Gradinarova states (2021), leadership is «a result of interaction between group members, in the performance of an overall activity, a person climbs a ladder to organize the group in solving a specific task” (p.155). The term “team leadership” comes from the phenomenon of a micro-working environment, where the position of a team leader is unstable, as it doesn’t manifest its facilities in the formal working environment. To remain on stable ground, a team leader must resort to team leadership practices to motivate and stimulate their subordinates’ work. As to a management term, “it refers to the organization of the overall activity of the group, to the process of its management” (Gradinarova, 2021, p.155). A team manager is a person who operates the general company mechanisms; this position is appointed formally, focusing on the manager’s possibilities and performances to conduct the working process.
Team management is a case of formal interaction with employees, as the primary aim is to achieve goals a company has set in the long run. Being a manager simultaneously with a team leader means being flexible and persistent in achieving company goals, paying attention to employees’ emotional well-being. This winning combination of a team-leadership structure and leadership management guarantees staggering success in the group-forming process.
Team Leadership Styles Relevant to the Workplace
Every team leader has to choose the most beneficial leadership structure in their performance. There are a lot of different leadership approaches aligned with a particular set of responsibilities and perspectives. An efficient organization has to operate on the following leadership structures. They are:
- Situational leadership (contingency theory);
- Servant leadership style (democratic basis);
- Transformational leadership style.
Situational Leadership (Contingency Theory)
Situational leadership style represents a leader’s ability to react, facilitate and enhance employees’ abilities related to the current situation. A team leader might have working knowledge concerning their employees’ aptitudes, skills, working, and salary expectations. This very information might help team leaders enhance company performance and prosperity.
Servant Leadership Style (Democratic Basis)
Implementing a servant leadership style, a current leader encourages their team workers, soaring their level of optimism and eradicating all possible frustrations. Evidently, “servant leaders primarily aim to achieve a shared vision by serving followers” (Rabiul&Yean 2021, p.1). Connor and Pokora (2017) claim that servant team leaders are driven by the desires and needs to learn and understand the deep-seated emotional triggers of people in order to make them listen, persuade, and guard. It means that servant leadership focuses on enhancing individuals’ moral and ethical development, highlighting more self-empowerment rather than centering around organizational interests.
Transformational Leadership Style
It regards “organizational goals by expanding and uplifting employees’’ self-interest” (Rabiul&Yean 2021, p.1). Transformative leaders are mentors and coaches, stimulating company participants’ motivation, creativity, and typical enthusiasm. Tapping into this kind of leadership structure, a team leader expects to change the vision of their followers, “becoming an example, providing support, and stimulating the desire to change for the better” (Purwanto et al., 2021, p.62). The transformational leadership style an individual applies for is a foundation for appropriate citizenship behavior in the working micro-environment.
Team-Leadership Self-Assessment
To perform my leadership self-assessment, I operate on the following aspects: my awareness of my strengths; and my leadership management initiatives. These profound concepts are essential for building up efficient interaction with my team members to achieve the mutual company goal. I put in my best efforts to be in the know of aptitudes, working and social values to build mutual trust and cooperation with my colleagues to form a group.
Analyzing my individual strengths, I am decisive that I represent the democratic leadership philosophy, which is the basis of workers’ want-satisfying management. As a leader, I go to great lengths to tailor to my employees’ needs and satisfactions to stimulate a positive working environment. This tactic is in charge of expanding my colleagues’ working potential and objectives aligned with the value capture of company efficiency in return. I tend to mix the democratic leadership approach combined with a team management framework as a dominant style. This effective combination is a prerequisite for employee freedom expansion, motivation refinement, and a company goal orientation.
Leadership initiatives I utilize in my management process are guidelines for enhancing personal skills and aptitudes characterizing me as a team leader. To motivate and stimulate people, I have assumed the importance of constant learning and knowledge refinance to tap into data services for analyzing and anticipating all possible behavioral outcomes my colleagues might manifest. All these essential aspects provide me with fat chances to make my organization a best-performing brand, where all members are satisfied and aim at promoting and advancing our mutual interests.
Evaluation of Leader B
Leader B is my role model to follow, as he is the embodiment of the trigger to motivate people to work as one complex body. He combines two leadership styles, such as servant and transformational ones. He is a person who encourages his employees, soaring their level of optimism and eradicating all possible frustrations. As a transformational leader, he hardly pays attention to his personal needs because his number-one priority is achieving group goals and providing a positive working environment for all members. He is a mature, competent, and qualified expert in physiological issues that anyone might counsel him and follow. To some extent, leader B is a mentor and a coach, motivating and stimulating company participants’ motivation, creativity, and enthusiasm. When it comes to his performance as a servant leader, he aims at enhancing employees’ moral and ethical development, highlighting more self-empowerment rather than centering around organizational interests.
Strategies to Form a Group
The profound functions of a team leader are to minimize all risks and weaknesses to the core, thus maximizing their leadership efficiency in terms of team-building. To excel in it, a team leader has to monitor their team worker abilities to enhance them and provide followers with a proper plan or guideline to refine their skills and aptitudes. Their primary function is to make an organization a complex body where all participants are involved in and obsessed with the idea of creating an organization as a profit-maximizing unit.
A team leader is liable for are a result of “group integration and maintenance, including adaptation and innovation to internal and external conditions that are dealt with successfully (Ford&Polin 2021, p.89). A team leader has to usher in diverse techniques and ways to be embedded in their team leadership policy, such as more detailed analysis of their followers’ working potential; strict control of their working performances.
Generally speaking, in order to eradicate all possible pitfalls, a team leader might use a modified situational leadership pattern that involves four leadership styles:
- S1-Telling (orientation on motivation, goal achievements);
- S2-Selling (satisfaction of employees’ social and emotional needs);
- S3-Participating (encouragement of skill development and task fulfillment);
- S4-Delegating (orientation on employees’ freedom) (Todorović&Todorović,2020).
The multiple and practical usages of these styles are beneficial solutions to issues a new-appointed team leader might face.
Team Building
Case Study: Team building is the component of team leadership theory that helps a team leader use valuable techniques and methods to organize a group. Evaluation of a particular organization (international organization Z) is a successful example of the team-building process. Referring to team leadership theories that are the foundation of the team-building process, this research paper proves that team building or group development is the paramount component of efficient company adjustment.
Team – Building Theory
Team building is forming group participants within an organizational frame to focus on the company’s overall goal and tailor company members’ needs. In this pattern, a leader has to consider potential benefits a company can get while forming a formal and informal group (West, 2012). The stages of the team-building process are:
- Forming;
- Storming;
- Norming;
- Performing.
Within this pattern, a team leader has to distribute objectives to their followers in order to achieve the desired goal of an organization (Buchanan & Huczynski, 2017). These stages are guidelines to organize a group where all participants work collectively.
Team -Working Theories
Team working theories:
- The theory of development and productivity (motivation is the critical element of this theory, as only motivated participants might follow their team leader in terms of achieving company goals);
- The theory of teamwork foundation (the interaction with human beings in the working micro-environment is a trigger to follow set role-models);
- The theory of seminal teamwork (team management theory that is mentioned above is the driving force in this theory, as participants are considered in this frame as not individuals but as a source of a company’s efficiency.
- The theory of teamwork elements (special elements of team leadership management, as positive micro-environments, behavioral patterns, a positive rapport with participants, and role distribution are major elements of this theory that facilitate the forming of a group).
Analysis of a Team of an International Company Z
The international company Z that embraces company members from different corners of the world is the perfect example of the mixed team working theory implementation. As this company is global, leaders who combine diverse team leadership approaches resort to all variants of team grouping, focusing on participants’ social contexts, backgrounds, and mentalities. Company executives of this organization consider servant leadership style combined with democratic one to be the beneficial foundation for the team-working foundation for development and productivity. The theory of teamwork elements is the backup approach for successful team building to stimulate company performance.
Conclusion
Team building is the branch of leadership where coaches and mentors have to focus on company participants’ needs and anticipations to administer a company’s financial prosperity. Team building is the collaborative working force where team members act out a complex structure complementing each other. The main aim of a team leader is to find a proper solution to unite all members and motivate them to achieve a company goal.
Reference List
Buchanan, D. A., & Huczynski, A. A. (2017). Organizational Behaviour, Pearson.
Connor, M. and Pokora, J. (2017). Coaching and mentoring at work: developing effective practice: developing effective practice. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
Ford, J., Ford, L., & Polin, B. (2021). Leadership in the implementation of change: Functions, sources, and requisite variety, Journal of Change Management, 21(1), pp. 87-119.
Gradinarova, N. (2021). Leadership vs management: understanding the key differences and similarities, Knowledge International Journal, 46(1), pp.155-161.
Purwanto, A., Purba, J. T., Bernarto, I., & Sijabat, R. (2021). Effect of transformational leadership, job satisfaction, and organizational commitments on organizational citizenship behaviour, Inovbiz: Jurnal Inovasi Bisnis, 9(1), pp. 61-69.
Rabiul, M. K., Yean, T. F. (2021). Leadership Styles, Motivating Language, and Work Engagement: An Empirical Investigation of the Hotel Industry, International Journal of Hospitality Management, 92(1), pp. 1-10.
Todorović, Z., & Todorović, B. (2020). Situational leadership in service organizations, Acta Economica, 18(33), pp. 115-129.
West, M. A. (2012). Effective teamwork: practical lessons from organizational research, John Wiley & Sons.