Leading Teams In Modern Business - November
2005
LEARNING TO LEAD: A Study of 50 Research and Development Teams - Source "Wharton Leadership Digest"
Classroom development of leadership can be effective but learning leadership from workplace experience can also be effective. Academic researchers Giles Hirst and associates studied the leadership of projects among teams engaged in research and development initiatives, and they focused on five areas of on-the-job leadership learning:
1) learning how to manage individuals
2) mastering team management
3) understanding how the organization works
4) dealing with people outside the team
5) acquiring technical knowledge
The researchers forecast that R&D team managers who improved in these five areas of leadership would also be better at team facilitation, defined as behavior that encourages and stimulates teamwork, and also better at team communication, defined as behavior that fosters the expression of diverse points of view within the team of how the team should perform its tasks. The researchers in turn predicted that improved facilitative leadership and team communication would result in better project performance.
The research group studied 50 teams with 313 members at four organizations in Australia that sponsored R&D projects in the areas of agriculture, information technology, defense, chemicals, materials, and resources. They asked the team leaders to rate how much they had learned from their project work during the past four months in the five areas of leadership learning. Team leaders and members rated the leaders' team facilitation and team communication, and teams and customers rated the teams' performance and project quality.
The investigators found as expected that team leaders who said that learned more on the job were also more highly rated in team facilitation and communication. And these factors in turn enhanced the teams' performance and project quality. Moreover, the researchers discovered that relatively new team leaders reported that they had learned more about leadership than relatively experienced team leaders. And they found that the impact of the leadership learning impact became more evident over time, with greater impact felt eight to twelve months later. "Work-based learning," concluded the researchers, "has a sustained impact on leadership behavior, and this effect is greatest for new leaders."
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