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