By Alyssa Curry and Lois De Leon, Undergraduate Research Assistants
Self-managed teams differ from traditional teams in organizations in that they do not assign a leader upon the team’s inception. Instead, leader emergence is a bottom-up process by which leaders develop organically, often dubbed “shared leadership.” CORE Lab alumna Christina Lacerenza explored predictors of emergent leadership in self-managed teams in her dissertation, “Leader Emergence in Self-Managed Teams as Explained by Surface- and Deep-Level Leader Traits.” In her study, Lacerenza examined “leader traits,” or the individual differences associated with leadership, in self-managed, engineering product-development teams over 16 weeks.
Lacerenza made several hypotheses for her study. Firstly, she hypothesized that the individuals who emerge as leaders during the team’s inception (“initial leader emergence”) are different than those who emerge at the end of the team’s life cycle (“lagged leader emergence”). However, her results revealed that an individual’s level of leader emergence remains stable, failing to support this hypothesis. In fact, it is not the leaders themselves who change during the team’s cycle, but rather the criteria for evaluating those leaders.
Lacerenza’s next hypotheses tested the effect of surface- and deep-level leader traits on leader emergence. Her second hypothesis predicted that the surface-level trait assertiveness has a significant effect on initial leader emergence. Assertiveness refers to one’s tendency to actively speak out about his or her own interests. Lacerenza’s results indicated that assertiveness predicted initial leader emergence, supporting her claim. In spite of this, when the model accounted for deep-level leader traits such as grit and technical competence, the predictive power of assertiveness diminished. Consequently, Lacerenza concluded that the relationship between assertiveness and initial leadership is more complex than previously thought.
She also hypothesized that deep-level traits predict leader emergence. For this case, she proposed that grit and technical competence would predict lagged leader emergence rather than initial leader emergence. Grit-perseverance is the deep-level trait associated with the persistence of long-term goals in the face of setbacks, while technical competence is the deep-level trait denoting an individual’s level of skills relevant to a particular job. As expected, Lacerenza’s results showed that grit was a strong predictor of lagged leader emergence. Technical competence, on the other hand, did not have a significant effect.
In addition to her main hypotheses and conclusions, Lacerenza performed a few supplemental analyses on gender and the Big Five personality traits. Specifically, she suggested that self-managed teams might be more likely to forego the bias associated with typical gender roles that tends to favor men. Lacerenza found evidence providing a basis of support for her claim and, as a practical implication, encouraged more self-managed teams in organizations in order to reduce gender disparity in leadership.
She then compared the surface- and deep-level leader traits of her study, deemed lower-level personality traits, to higher-level Big Five traits. The Big Five is a set of five broad trait dimensions encompassing personality. Lacerenza proposed that lower-level traits have greater predictive power than higher-level traits on leader emergence due to their specific nature. For example, grit-perseverance is one aspect of the Big Five trait conscientiousness, the preference for leading a structured life around task-directed behavior. Though Lacerenza demonstrated the predictive validity of grit on leader emergence, she noted that other research could not say the same for conscientiousness.
Lacerenza’s study on assertiveness, grit and technical competence significantly expands previous research on leader emergence traits in self-managed teams. Her findings are key for identifying, hiring and training today’s leaders as the shift to self-managed teams becomes more prominent in the workplace.
Work Cited
Lacerenza, C. N. (2018). Leader emergence in self-managed teams as explained by surface- and deep-level leader traits. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering. ProQuest Information & Learning. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.rice.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&AN=2018-11224-011&site=ehost-live&scope=site