More and more organisations are embracing a team approach in their quest to meet the demands of a turbulent marketplace. The dynamics of teams and teamwork are fascinating. Most managers in today’s collaborative and consultative environments need to develop teams and team leadership to achieve good results through others. Strong teams assist managers and they make organisations stronger, but the converse is also true – weak teams severely weaken organisations. Although there are many perspectives regarding teamwork, the general enthusiasm for teams and what they can accomplish remains strong. Work teams in South Africa are becoming a lucrative business. Already in the 1990s, no fewer than 82% of companies with more than 100 employees reported using team structures (Gordon, 2002). During the same period, as many as 68% of the Fortune 1000 companies used self-managed teams (Lawler, Mohrman&Ledford, 1995). There were two main reasons for undertaking this study: satisfying my own natural inquisitiveness regarding teams, and investigating teamwork and the expectations of employees of teamwork in 21st century South African organisations. I set out to explore, describe and understand the challenges teams have to face, as well as individuals’ expectations of working in teams. A qualitative approach, with due reference to the multiple levels of organisational behaviour (individual, groups and organisational level), was applied in this quest to understand team expectations and challenges in context. A total of 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and four focus group interviews were conducted amongst 38 voluntary participants. The transcripts were then thoroughly analysed and compared to identify shared themes and to explore differences and similarities in terms of team experiences and expectations. Four themes and numerous sub-themes evolved from the research. Theme 1 deals with the individual level expectations of teamwork, and represents the individuals’ need to be part of the organisation and to enjoy this experience. Theme 2 indicates the specific team level expectations of team work. Teams expressed a need for clear roles and to be rewarded if they reached those goals, as well as for team skills. Theme 3 deals with the expectations that leaders and organisations have when they implement teamwork. It turns out that organisations often implement teams and expect them to solve business problems without offering the relevant support to those teams. Theme 4 addresses the greatest challenges teams face in 21st century South African organisations. Virtual teaming and a loss of identity are identified as a few of these challenges. The themes as well as sub-themes are discussed in detail in Chapter 4. Based on the study findings, several recommendations are made based on the shared experiences and unique feedback of these 38 individuals from all organisational levels. I further identify various “team paradoxes”, as I call them, and indicate the relevance of these paradoxes in understanding teams. Some of the findings question existing premises regarding teamwork, establishing a foundation for possible future research. The truth is that there is still much to be done in terms of optimising team effectiveness and a better organisational understanding of the complexities of individuals working together in teams. / Thesis (PhD (Organizational Behaviour))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Human Resource Management / unrestricted

The aim of my thesis is a summary of a leading of a team problems with concentration to modern approaches esp. to teambuilding activities. The thesis is devided into five captires. The first one is dedicated to particular styles of leading of the teams, the second capture is about factors of the team dynamics, particular team roles and phases of building a team. The third capture is dedicated to the teambuilding problems. I try to explain its sense, describe its particular phases and mention examples of teambuilding activities. In the fourth capture I introduce a company which deals with teambuilding, AG Vapiti, s. r. o. its services and typical clients. A depth interview with a client of AG Vapiti, s. r. o. and comparsion with a rival company a follow. The last capture of the thesis is the research on the basis of questionary about the gain of teambuilding. At the end I summarize the knowledge I gained by composing the thesis.

Companies from across the globe move from traditional towards virtual organisations to be able to respond effectively to developments and changes in the global economy. As a consequence, the leadership of virtual teams will evolve as one of the major challenges future leaders will have to face. Hence, this triggers a growing demand in knowledge and understanding of virtual teams from both science and practice. So far, there is only basic research available on key elements of virtual teaming and limited literature on the leadership of virtual teams. With the increasing significance of a corporate culture in organisations, science will want to investigate its impact on virtual team leadership. Shedding light into this matter is hence this dissertation\'s main objective. After a thorough literature review and a pre-study, a leading EURO STOXX 50 company which has rolled out a global corporate culture in the past years was investigated using interviews with experienced virtual team leaders. Their experiences from before and after the introduction of a global corporate culture were assessed and analysed. Finally, focus groups were conducted to validate the results. In order to provide a holistic picture of the influence of a global corporate culture on the leaders of virtual teams, each empirical component follows a three phase sequence. First, it seeks to understand the environment of a virtual team leader, aiming specifically at investigating how the corporate culture shifts the behaviour of virtual team members. In the next phase, it focuses on how virtual leaders then react to the shift in team member behaviour. The last phase focuses on how the leaders are directly influenced by the global corporate culture themselves. The results of the study show that a common global corporate culture positively influences the collaboration of virtual team members and increases harmony between them. This leads to higher team performance. In response to this shift in team behaviour as well as due to the direct impact of the corporate culture, the leader himself switches gradually from a transactional towards a transformational leadership style, thereby again increasing the performance of the team. The results of the empirical research are channelled into a final product, namely detailed best practices for virtual team leaders on how to develop themselves and their team into effective virtual collaborators. This model uses corporate culture as a catalyst.

Emergency medical teams operate under unusual circumstances. They assemble for a singular, temporary purpose, potentially change in size and composition, and their performance can influence whether a patient lives or dies. Although leadership is a critical component to team success, it is rarely investigated in the context of emergency medical teams. This study sought to examine the relationship between directive leadership behaviors and team performance outcomes. It was hypothesized that directive leadership would be particularly effective for emergency medical teams. In addition, a contingency model was proposed. Specifically, it was hypothesized that the effectiveness of directive leadership is contingent upon the complexity of the situation and the experience level of the team such that directive leadership is more effective when teams are inexperienced and the situation is complex. Neonatal resuscitation teams served as the emergency medical teams in this study. The proposed relationships were tested using observations from high-fidelity, neonatal resuscitation team training simulations. Hypotheses were not supported. Limitations and suggestions for future research for the development of leadership training curriculum are discussed.

Team leadership research has largely relied on traditional dyadic models (i.e., those capturing one-on-one relationships between a leader and follower) to explain team-level phenomena. Despite recent advancements, much of this research falls short of addressing the complexity inherent to teams. One promising alternative to the traditional perspectives, functional leadership theory, moves beyond the constraints of dyadic models and instead advances a needs-based approach for understanding team leadership (i.e., effective leaders are those that meet any and all team needs). Although intuitive, the ambiguous nature of simply meeting team needs does not provide sufficient specificity as to how exactly leaders meet team needs. In an effort to address this issue, I introduce a multi-dimensional construct, called leader focus, to explain how leaders meet team needs by focusing their efforts on teamwork or taskwork (i.e., person-task focus) as well as different relational entities in the team (i.e., entity focus). In total, I propose six unique foci of team leadership: individual task-focus, team task-focus, subgroup task-focus, individual person-focus, team person-focus, and subgroup person-focus. Next, using social interdependence theory, I hypothesize that individual-focused leadership is most effective when task interdependence is low, whereas team- and subgroup-focused leadership are most effective when task interdependence is high. Further, person-focused leadership is hypothesized to influence team effectiveness by way of interpersonal processes; task-focused leadership is argued to influence team effectiveness via task-related processes. In a sample of 89 firefighting crews, partial support is found for the multi-foci model of team leadership. Team task-focused leadership influences team task performance indirectly through task processes; team person-focused and subgroup person-focused leadership influence team helping behaviors through interpersonal processes. Moreover, the relationship between individual task-focused and subgroup task-focused leadership on team processes is contingent on task interdependence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

To enable the nurse at least to perform her profession at a standard level, she needs not only material equipment, but also most of all the moral support of her superiors. Sufficient knowledge and experience are important for that profession as well. Another important aspect is to be able to see the meaningful tasks of her work and to have a feeling of certainty. My work has got three targets, which are: Target 1: To show, how the nurses of the middle management motivate their juniors to make them work more efficiently. Target 2: To analyze experience of middle management nurses with a team management. Target 3: To show whether, and in which way the nurses in the middle management motivate their juniors to increase their professional competence. I have used a qualitative research method for my study. A technique of an in-depth discussion was used for the collection of data. The research group contained 14 nurses in chief positions. The statements of individual nurses were categorized. They were divided into six basic groups, which are: Motivation factors, de-motivation factors, composition of the working team, work in a team, education and registration.

This thesis contemplates virtual teams, in particular the role of a leader in them. In the theoretical part of the thesis I explore and describe specific characteristics of virtual teams that distinguish them from the traditional teamwork paradigm, benefits and risks stemming from their use in the business world and policies and principles of leadership of different types of virtual teams that help achieve their maximum efficiency. In the practical portion of the thesis I demonstrate the negative effects of neglecting those principles by studying an example of a real, failed virtual team.

Leadership is an area of increasing interest for the engineering profession. Strategic documents assert the need for engineers to take more prominent leadership roles to better inform complex policy decisions. Engineering leadership scholars assert, however that adequate models of how engineers lead do not exist and that traditional leadership models are contrary to the collaborative norms of engineering practice. To address this gap in engineering leadership literature, this dissertation develops a model of how engineering students lead in team-based design project environments, an example of the collaborative environment that is commonplace in engineering practice. This quantitative study used a combination of round-robin (360-degree) survey data and course grades to examine the Full Range of Leadership within mechanical engineering-centric capstone design teams. Using a combination of cluster analyses, social network analyses, and regression analyses in a three manuscript approach, this dissertation 1) validated a Mechanical Engineering capstone version of the Full Range of Leadership, 2) determined the degree of shared leadership within the teams and how to classify teams based on their degree of shared leadership, and 3) related shared leadership to both team effectiveness and team attributes. The study resulted in a shared leadership model for engineering design teams. The model represents leadership as a three-form, shared phenomenon within teams. The amount of leadership within the team relates positively to both the group process and satisfaction measures of team effectiveness, but not to task performance. This relationship is moderated by the distribution of leadership, indicating that a limited amount of shared leadership may be more effective. Selected team attributes are related to the degree of shared leadership within the teams. The results broaden our conceptualization of leadership beyond an individual phenomenon, making it a shared phenomenon that is an integral component of design teamwork as it relates to design team effectiveness. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this intrinsic case study was to show how Expert Team Theory can explain the application of goal orientated rehearsal strategies which were designed for this study for an ad hoc ensemble at the School of Music of the North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. The case study was considered as the most suitable research method to investigate the ways in which goal-orientated rehearsal strategies influence dynamics during rehearsals of a new music ensemble, and the experiences by the members of their interaction, because this approach allowed me to investigate these strategies in a real world environment. This study was born out of an interest in rehearsal strategies and in different ways to structure music rehearsals. The characteristics of a new music ensemble determined the use of Expert Team Theory as the theoretical basis for the design of the goalorientated rehearsal strategies. These characteristics correspond well with that of an expert team as “a set of interdependent team members, each of whom possesses unique and expert-level knowledge, skills, and experience related to task performance, and who adapt, coordinate, and cooperate as a team, thereby producing sustainable and repeatable team functioning at superior or at least nearoptimal levels of performance” (Salas et al., 2006:439-440). Based on interviews with the participants and the observations of video recordings of the rehearsals, the results show that interpreting the data through the theoretical lens of Expert Team Theory enabled me to explain the rehearsal process as a dynamic confluence of experiences created through the interaction of the ensemble members who grew through increasing cooperation and coordination to resemble an expert team. Their sense of collectiveness and their trust coupled with strong leadership allowed the success of the strategy of prebrief-performance-debrief. The ensemble developed progressively clearer shared mental models and understandings of roles and responsibilities. A clear, valued and shared vision helped them to manage and optimize performance outcomes. The findings are also interrogated in terms of cooperative learning to further explain the web-like way in which different themes developed. This led to a discussion of the limitations of this study and suggestions for further research. / MA (Performance), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The purpose of this intrinsic case study was to show how Expert Team Theory can explain the application of goal orientated rehearsal strategies which were designed for this study for an ad hoc ensemble at the School of Music of the North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. The case study was considered as the most suitable research method to investigate the ways in which goal-orientated rehearsal strategies influence dynamics during rehearsals of a new music ensemble, and the experiences by the members of their interaction, because this approach allowed me to investigate these strategies in a real world environment. This study was born out of an interest in rehearsal strategies and in different ways to structure music rehearsals. The characteristics of a new music ensemble determined the use of Expert Team Theory as the theoretical basis for the design of the goalorientated rehearsal strategies. These characteristics correspond well with that of an expert team as “a set of interdependent team members, each of whom possesses unique and expert-level knowledge, skills, and experience related to task performance, and who adapt, coordinate, and cooperate as a team, thereby producing sustainable and repeatable team functioning at superior or at least nearoptimal levels of performance” (Salas et al., 2006:439-440). Based on interviews with the participants and the observations of video recordings of the rehearsals, the results show that interpreting the data through the theoretical lens of Expert Team Theory enabled me to explain the rehearsal process as a dynamic confluence of experiences created through the interaction of the ensemble members who grew through increasing cooperation and coordination to resemble an expert team. Their sense of collectiveness and their trust coupled with strong leadership allowed the success of the strategy of prebrief-performance-debrief. The ensemble developed progressively clearer shared mental models and understandings of roles and responsibilities. A clear, valued and shared vision helped them to manage and optimize performance outcomes. The findings are also interrogated in terms of cooperative learning to further explain the web-like way in which different themes developed. This led to a discussion of the limitations of this study and suggestions for further research. / MA (Performance), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015