LEADERSHIP

Leadership

Leadership

Team norms are usually unconnected from the position-specific roles prescribed by a team's manager. These norms are often unwritten and evolve through the course of ongoing group development. While those responsible for developing teams, such as managers, can allow team norms to evolve naturally, several benefits are associated with formalizing appropriate team norms. This can be accomplished by encouraging team members to contribute to and decide on their own set of expectations. Such an approach can foster employee autonomy and is more likely to result in employees committing to these rules than if the rules are directly prescribed by a manager. This, in turn, can facilitate a sense of cohesion among team members.

Discussion

The use of goal-setting strategies has also been found to positively influence team cohesion. In particular, when employees are involved in setting out their own process- and performance-oriented goals (rather than having these goals prescribed to them), they tend to be more committed to the group's endeavors, thus resulting in improved group integration.

While team cohesion, to a large extent, depends on the quality of interpersonal relations among employees within a team, the manager can also play a prominent role in fostering group cohesion and a healthy team culture. For example, a growing body of evidence from various organizational settings has found that when leaders display transformational behaviors, their teams tend to be more cohesive.

Transformational leaders motivate followers to go beyond their self-interests for the good of the group and give group members the confidence to exceed minimally accepted standards. When managers display transformational leadership behaviors, their employees have been found to display more self-determined forms of motivation (e.g., intrinsic motivation) and also tend to perform better than employees who are managed by non-transformational leaders.

Describe how you can apply the team approach to your case study

 If I would be applying team approach to the case, I will also go to apply Servant leadership in this case. As Servant leadership is one that has attracted substantial interest among many leaders over the past few decades. Many scholars attribute the concept of servant leadership to Robert K. Greenleaf, a notable management consultant who, prior to entering that field of work, spent a significant number of years at AT&T working in management development, research, and education (Spears, 2004). Greenleaf (1977) posited that “the servant-leader is servant first.

It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve”. In this sense, leadership begins with a commitment from the potential leader to serve others rather than pursuing his own self-interest, and this essentially is what is central to a leader's greatness (Spears, 2004). Greenleaf believed the primary purpose of business organizations should be to create a positive impact on their employees and surrounding community (Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn, 2008). Yukl (2006) sums up additional attributes of servant leadership:

The servant leader must stand for what is good and right, even when it is not in the financial interest of the organization. Social injustice and inequality should be opposed whenever ...