Exploring leadership in self-managed project teams in Malaysia

This paper focuses on a longitudinal approach in exploring leadership in Self-Managed Project Teams (SMPT). SMPT has been known to contribute to organizations by improving productivity and increasing organizational performance. Therefore, understanding the dynamics of leadership in this type of team can be seen as one of the important factors to ensure the success of organizations. Leading a team which manages itself is a challenge as increased autonomy and control is given to the team which eliminates the existence of a leader. It is important to understand the extent of how the external leader is involved within SMPT and whether the external leader approaches highlighted in the literature are applicable in such a situation and how these approaches change during work processes. This study comprises of evidence collected through semi-structured interviews in two small and medium sized organizations in Malaysia. Weekly telephone interviews as well as face-to-face interviews were conducted which provides contextual data for the research. In this research, the evidence suggested that SMPT transform from self-managed toward leader-managed resulting from several factors, such as conflict handling strategies. Specifically, it was found that avoiding conflicts, rather than confronting, transform the team into being leader dependent