Team Leadership

Joseph E. McGrath (1927–2007), social psychologist at the University of Illinois, spent a career studying groups, time, and stress. His functional perspective — the leader's job is to do whatever the group needs to perform — grounds modern team-effectiveness research, from Hackman's team design to today's team-leadership models.

McGrath's functional view defined team leadership by its function — do whatever the team needs to perform — monitoring versus action-taking, internal versus external. The foundation of modern team-effectiveness models.

The era: Dynamic Interaction — A dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups; emphasis on managing environmental cross points.

The leader's job: monitor and take action on what the team needs.

Where this work feeds the Open Sky frameworks.

Fellow travelers on these threads:

• McGrath, J. E. (1984). Groups: Interaction and Performance. Prentice-Hall. Google Scholar ↗
• Hackman, J. R., & Walton, R. E. (1986). Leading groups in organizations. In P. S. Goodman (Ed.), Designing Effective Work Groups. Jossey-Bass. Google Scholar ↗
• Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Harvard Business School Press. Google Scholar ↗