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This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on leadership processes in groups. It investigates leadership both as a role and as influence, and considers structural influences on group leadership communication. A short chronological overview on the most important leadership theories gives a special emphasis on the meaning and role of communication within these approaches. The chapter shares the common basis of the handbook in communication as a fundamental and critical process in groups and teams. Approaches where communication plays a central role is amplified. The last paragraph focuses on three newer strands of leadership research as well as management practices. In each of these new contexts, leadership as a functional role and as social influence is discussed and the criticality of interaction and communication traced.

In this chapter we examine various human resource management (HRM) implications involved in the leadership of fluid teams. Leadership of fluid teams, which are distinguished by their dynamic composition, requires consideration of issues that may not be as pertinent for stable teams. In particular, we focus on the concept of familiarity. Composing and leading teams with members exhibiting varying degrees of familiarity with one another creates obstacles to effective and efficient functioning and may ultimately lead to poor performance. With this in mind, leaders must pay particular attention to issues of coordination, and composition such that a broad range of generalizable teamwork skills exists within the team. Within this chapter, we explain the concepts of fluid teams, team leadership within fluid teams, and other relevant concepts related to the formation of familiarity. Next, we thoroughly review extant empirical and theoretical research within these areas. We identify areas of correspondence among the various concepts and findings of the reviewed studies and generate an integrated model of fluid team leadership. To conclude, we highlight the distinct HRM implications associated with the use, and leadership, of fluid teams.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the roles of online leadership in open collaborative innovation success by extending functional leadership theory in the context of open source projects.

This study uses negative binomial regression models to empirically test the proposed hypotheses with samples of blockchain open source projects on GitHub.

The results indicate that task-oriented leadership behaviors in forms of technical contributions have little influence on open collaborative innovation success; relation-oriented leadership behaviors embedded in internal social capital and external social capital contribute to open collaborative innovation success prominently. Furthermore, the joint effects of technical contributions, internal social capital and community commitment with openness orientation are positively significant on open collaborative innovation success, respectively.

For leaders and participants of open collaborative innovation projects, they should attach importance to both leadership behaviors and the joint effects with openness orientation so as to make informed decisions.

This study offers a new fine-grained framework of open collaborative innovation success by investigating specific dimensions of task-oriented and relation-orientated leadership behaviors, as well as their joint effects with openness orientation.

Our aim is to catalog how the functional behaviors that leaders engage in should change over time based on the needs of the team – thereby presenting a functional view of team leadership over time.

A critical review of the literature on team leadership, team development, and teams was conducted. This information was critically analyzed and integrated to produce a framework serving to depict how team needs change over time, and based on this, highlight the leadership behaviors which should be most critical at particular points in time. Based on the limited amount of literature that explicitly focused on team leadership over time, a series of propositions which flow from the framework are also put forth.

Great strides have been made in understanding team leadership; however, little work was uncovered that directly focused on how leadership dynamics change over time within the context of the team. Leveraging the limited work that existed, we developed a framework (and propositions) that serves to delineate how team leadership functions change over time. In doing so, we have integrated work delineating leadership functions within transition and action phases of team task cycles along with that highlighting how the role of the leader may vary based on team developmental needs.

The originality of this chapter lies in its using a functional approach to leadership to argue how the efficacy of particular leadership functions change over time based on team task cycles and development needs. This, in turn, can be used to focus training efforts.

Despite extensive research on personality and leader emergence, very little is known about the process by which employees become or emerge as leaders based on their performance. Integrating functional leadership theory and a behavior perspective, the authors aim to explore the parallel multiple behavioral mediators in the conscientiousness–leader emergence link.

By integrating a field survey study and two experimental studies, the authors use parallel multiple mediation analysis to explore the mechanisms by which conscientiousness leads to high levels of leader emergence.

Conscientiousness is positively associated with employee leader emergence. Employee functional behaviors are positively associated with leader emergence. The authors consistently found that the effect of conscientiousness on leader emergence is primarily explained by increases in task- and change-oriented behaviors but not relations-oriented behaviors.

Organizations can design relevant training programs to cultivate and enhance employees' functional behavior, as the study findings suggest that an effective way to translate employees' conscientiousness into their leader emergence is to improve their task- and change-oriented behaviors.

This research highlights the consistent and important role of employees' functional behaviors in the form of task- and change-oriented behaviors linking conscientiousness to leader emergence.

Leadership is a crucial driver of project performance. While traditionally, the project leader was considered as the exclusive source of leadership behavior, recent research indicates that particularly dispersed projects may profit from joint leadership efforts by all project members. However, leadership functions in dispersed projects are likely to differ from those in a face-to-face context. In this chapter, we specify shared leadership functions for the domain of geographically dispersed project teams with high levels of task uncertainty. Arguing that shared leadership in dispersed teams occurs through interrelation of individual and team actions, we specify a dispersed screening function as well as self-, other-, and team-directed interrelation functions and develop propositions on how these functions are related to project performance. Furthermore, we point to motivational aspects of shared leadership and discuss the role of the vertical leader in developing and facilitating shared leadership.

This study, based on motivated information processing theory and theories of leadership (contingency and functional), investigates how servant leadership (SL) could be an effective leadership style for employee creative deviance engagement (CDE) to foster radical (RC) and incremental creativity (IC) in two different goal-oriented organizations: learning (LGO) and performance (PGO) goal-oriented organizations.

This study employed descriptive and comparative approaches and surveyed two sources (leaders and team members). Using multi-source data involving 486 LGO-based and 498 PGO-based employee–supervisor dyads from 104 LGO-based and 104 PGO-based high-tech firms in China, the authors distinguish comparative support for assumed hypotheses by using the Monte Carlo simulation technique for the indirect effects and Mplus for multilevel path analysis.

The study outcomes found that SL transmits the effects of employee CDE directly and nurtures RC and IC indirectly. It identified that an organization's LGO strengthens the direct and indirect relationships between SL and creativity via employee's CDE when the organization's LGO is high. However, an organization's PGO strengthens the direct relationship when it's low and strengthens the indirect link between SL and IC when it's high. In addition, the organization's PGO demonstrated an insignificant effect on the indirect relationship between SL and RC.

This study is the first to verify SL as the specific leadership style for responding employee's CDE and identify its distinctive effects on RC and IC. Additionally, there has been no effort to associate SL with employee's CDE for nurturing distinctive types of creativity under the different organizational dispositions (LGO and PGO).

Fostered by technological developments and globalization, culturally diverse teams are becoming a mainstay of organizational strategy. As the use of multi-cultural teams continues to increase, it becomes paramount to understand the mechanism(s) by which leaders can promote effectiveness within these teams. Despite this need, there are numerous challenges facing those who seek to understand these phenomena and move science and practice forward. The purpose of this chapter is to present a few of these challenges and approaches which can assist in mitigating these challenges. Finally, we identify what we see as key research needs within this area.

Prior studies have consistently treated participative leadership as a given leadership style. Conversely, this study aims to prove that participative leadership can be predicted by leaders and teams collectively, depending on leaders' work characteristics (i.e. workload).

A two-source survey was designed to collect data from a sample of 89 leader-team dyads in a trading company in a southeastern Chinese city. Polynomial regression and response surface analysis were used to test the hypotheses.

The leader showed more participative leadership when leader-team future orientation was congruent rather than incongruent; in the congruent situation, there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between leader-team future orientation congruence and participative leadership; in the incongruent situation, when the team's future orientation gradually exceeded the leader's, participative leadership first increased and then decreased; and leader workload positively moderated the relationship between leader-team future orientation congruence and participative leadership.

These findings theoretically respond to the call for investigating the influence of leader-team future orientation congruence on leaders’ behaviors, and in practice enlighten managers on how to encourage supervisors to involve employees in decision-making processes.

Due to the proliferation of measures (and conceptualisations) employed to assess shared leadership behaviours, it is unclear to researchers and practitioners which specific team behaviours should be encouraged and which measures should be included in research to enhance team effectiveness outcomes. To address this issue, this research tests 11 shared leadership scales to identify which measures and behaviours exhibit the strongest relationship with team effectiveness.

This research utilises survey methods (n = 328) to test the measurement of shared leadership using 11 previously validated scales. This novel approach uses structural equation modelling techniques (SEM) to compare and contrast multiple measures targeting a single underlying construct.

Across the 11 measures tested (drawn from three theoretical perspectives), no single scale demonstrated a superior ability to assess shared leadership (based on model-fit and effect size exhibited). Nevertheless, the results indicated that measures assessing shared transformational leadership were most highly related to team effectiveness; whilst the shared leadership density measure (using social network techniques) exhibited the weakest relationship.

Limitations of this research include the use of a student sample (although participants were screened based on their current employment in a team environment), and the individual assessment of shared leadership rather than team assessment. These findings indicate that shared transformational leadership behaviours are highly related to perceptions of team effectiveness. It is recommended future research define and delineate between constructs of interest, including general forms shared leadership (i.e. shared leadership broadly defined) and more specific forms of shared leadership (e.g. shared transformational leadership [narrowly defined]).

It is recommended that interventions and/or training designed to enhance team shared leadership outcomes should specifically target shared transformational leadership behaviours; especially when aiming to increase beneficial team outcomes such as effectiveness or potency.

This research is novel in both advancing our understanding of the shared leadership behaviours needed to enhance team effectiveness; and in methodological approaches comparing and contrasting multiple measures of a single latent construct.