7 research outputs found
The impact of personal reputation on leader emergence in autonomous work teams : theoretical considerations for future research
Purpose – Research has demonstrated that varying degrees and combinations of individual traits, behaviors
and characteristics influence the emergence of leaders in teams. While existing models have shown that such
variables affect leader choice independently and interactively, the overall findings suggest that there is still a
lack of research on a potentially significant factor, the impact of personal reputation on leader selection in
autonomous work teams (AWTs), an increasingly ubiquitous team practice in organizations. This preliminary
review thus aims to offer a general overview of personal reputation and its effects on leader emergence in the
context of AWTs.
Design/methodology/approach – By surveying extant literature on team leader emergence, this review has
identified that the potential impact of personal reputation on leader selection in teams is significant yet largely
ignored.
Findings – Models of leader emergence in teams should incorporate the realistic assumption that teams
formed in organizations are often comprised of individuals who have information on others either directly or
indirectly. Personal reputation based on an individual’s history thus moderates how one’s behaviors or traits
exhibited become contextualized in the overall assessment of leader desirability and selection in teams.
Research limitations/implications – Based on a review of existing research on leadership emergence and
personal reputation, this work contends that the external validity and predictive value of leader emergence
models would greatly benefit from the inclusion of employee reputations as a moderating variable in the future
assessment of the leader emergence process in AWTs.
Practical implications – By designing models that explain the potential effects of personal reputations on
leader emergence in self-managed teams, team members and managers can be better elucidated and ultimately
improve their understanding of the process of the evaluation and selection of team leaders.
Originality/value – Despite the prolific research on leader emergence, there is still a paucity of studies
examining personal reputational effects on leader selection, especially in the context of AWTs. This work is the
first review piece calling for the inclusion of personal reputation, a substantive factor overlooked and excluded
in previous models, to enhance the current understanding of leader emergence in AWTs.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Teams and Tournaments in Relational Contracts
This paper analyses and compares optimal relational contracts be-
tween a principal/firm and a set of agents when (a) only aggregate out-
put can be observed, and (b) individual outputs can be observed. We
show that the optimal contract under (a) is a team incentive scheme
where each agent is paid a maximal bonus for aggregate output above
a threshold and a minimal (no) bonus otherwise. The team's effi-
ciency decreases with its size (number of agents) when outputs are
non-negatively correlated, but may increase considerably with size if
outputs are negatively correlated. In the case where individual output
can be observed, we show that the optimal contract is a tournament
scheme where the conditions for an agent to obtain the (single) bonus
are stricter for negatively compared to positively correlated outputs.
We finally show that if agents have bargaining power, firms may delib-
erately choose to organize production as a team where only aggregate
output is observable. The team alternative is more likely to be supe-
rior under negatively correlated outputs