Effects of Leader Role, Team-Set Goal Difficulty, Efficacy, 
and Tactics on Team Effectiveness

Durham, C.C., Knight, D., & Locke, E.A.,  (1997)  Effects of leader role, team-set 

A video game simulation, work teams, and leaders - an experiment that discovers the impact of leadership on work team effectiveness.

Cathy Durham, Don Knight, and Edwin Locke utilized concepts from three domains:  leadership theory, social cognitive theory, and goal setting theory, to identify factors influencing team effectiveness.  They set out to find how leadership, motivation, and competencies of a team would affect the team's performance.  

 Leadership takes into account the degree of participative decision making (PDM) and autonomy given to the team.  PDM will be most beneficial when used as an information exchange method.  Passing along valuable information to the subordinates and among them is a communication key to team success.  In this study, two different types of leaders were designated, the commander, who was a traditional leader with a more autocratic style, and a coordinator, who acted like a coach or facilitator to the team.  

There was no manipulation of task ability or knowledge of the skill used in the activity, but the researchers did measure it.  The type of task here was a team task in which members had to discover how to attain certain goals.  A tank battle simulation was used as the activity to study this type of performance.

Goal setting looks at motivational factors in this study.  This theory states that simple tasks require more universal strategies using learned skills, and more complex tasks require skills that have to be discovered.  To relate this to the organizational setting, this can be compared to training vs. discovery of how to complete a task.  In this study, the task was a new one where skills would have to be discovered.

Social cognitive theory was used to look at self efficacy (self-confidence about a specific task), a powerful effect on team performance.  The researchers believed that efficacy would be a team level variable and predicted task difficulty to affect team efficacy in turn affecting team performance.

The study used two hundred sixteen university students with a 50/50 split between males and females.  An even number of groups contained two males with one female and two females with one male. An even number of groups also had commanders as well as coordinators.  Each member of the team was to navigate his/her own tank and destroy pillboxes to complete the task.  The task was designed to be successful only when the members worked as a team.  The teams had sessions where they could perform the task then break and form a new strategy if necessary.  The scoring at the end was tallied for each team and compared.

 The researchers first found that when teams have to learn a new task requiring coordination among members, leadership role makes a difference in the development of tactics.  The coordinator led teams, more suited to a self managed team in the organizational setting, were more successful.  It is suggested to be so due to the greater cognitive involvement of all members and better communication.

 Leadership role also indirectly affected performance through its effects on team tactics.  Leadership has been shown to affect follower goals and self efficacy through charismatic leadership and motivating factors.

 A third finding was that the PDM style of leadership, which was most effective, had effects that were cognitive in nature.  The PDM style did not have effects on team goals or efficacy, but aids in strategy or tactic formulation.  A shared knowledge by team subordinates and the team leader allow groups to develop better team tactics.

 This research has direct application to self managing work teams in organizations.  It is an excellent example of a study that looked at different factors in assessing team performance.  If you are a leader or member of a self managing work team, whether traditionally lead or facilitated, this would be an excellent article to take a look at.  I suggest this as a must read for those that fall into this category.

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