It’s Not Just What is Said, but When it’s Said: A Temporal Account of Verbal Behaviors and Emergent Leadership in Self-Managed Teams

By Fabiola H. Gerpott, N. Lehmann‐Willenbrock, S. Voelpel ‡, M. van Vugt. Academy of Management Journal, 2019

106 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emergent leadership—the ascription of informal leadership responsibilities among team members—is a dynamic phenomenon that comes into place through social interactions. Yet, theory remains sparse about the importance of verbal behaviors for emergent leadership in self-managed teams over a team’s lifecycle. Adopting a functional perspective on leadership, we develop a temporal account that links changes in task-, change-, and relations-oriented communication to emergent leadership in early, middle, and late team phases. We test the hypothesized relationships in 42 teams that provided round-robin emergent leadership ratings and videotapes of their first, midterm, and final meetings. Team members’ verbal behaviors were captured using fine-grained empirical interaction coding. Multilevel modeling showed that task-oriented communication was a stable positive predictor of emergent leadership at all time points. Change-oriented communication predicted emergent leadership at the start of the project and diminishe...

Subfields: Communication, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d61b15deafa6fa76c46fe16efb22c414f7ae44a3

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Citations in the corpus

Pandemics: Implications for research and practice in industrial and organizational psychology (2020, background): “Observational studies on leadership emergence during the pandemic crisis could further examine what individuals who emerge as leaders during the crisis actually “do” (and why and when they do it), including behaviors such as listening as well as task-, relationship-, and change-oriented communicatio”
The Emergence of Emergent Leadership: A Comprehensive Framework and Directions for Future Research (2021, background): “Team-level affect-based outcomes are perceived team trustworthiness (Cogliser et al., 2012) and team attention (Gerpott et al., 2019).”