Toward Understanding Team Leadership: The Empirical Development of a Team Leadership Classification System

The purpose of this research was to develop a classification system of team leadership through the empirical process of numerical classification. Although the value and importance of leadership have been recognized in the team literature, few empirical studies have been conducted to understand the phenomenon of team leadership. A thorough review of the relevant literature was conducted to identify the various behaviors, functions, traits, and KSAOs associated with team leadership. This information was then used to select and construct data collection instruments for the classification process. Two separate studies were conducted to achieve the overall goal of developing a team leadership classification system. In the first study, the data collection instruments were constructed and tested with a sample of 71 teams, each team being represented by a single subject matter expert. The instruments included a structured interview, a leadership questionnaire, a leadership behaviors form requiring extent of involvement and importance ratings, a leader behavior rating task based on the LBDQ-XII and LOQ, a KSAO rating task, a leader involvement rating task, and a measure designed to assess an entity\u27s level of teamness. A series of statistical analyses (e.g., exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, reliability and item analyses) were performed to evaluate and refine the psychometric properties of the measures. In the second study, the revised and refined measures were used to collect data on a diverse sample of 100 teams. Data from four of the measures were used to identify team leadership types by means of Ward\u27s method of hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis. Various cluster solutions were evaluated through the two-sample cross-validation procedure, and the best solutions were identified on the basis of their stability and estimated accuracy. The external validity of the three most accurate solutions was then evaluated through a series of analysis of variance procedures with dependent data provided by the interview, questionnaire, and teamness measure. Based on the results, a classification system of five team leadership types was selected, described, and validated. Implications of the research are discussed and recommendations for future research are provided