An empirical taxonomy of leadership situations: Development, validation, and implications for the science and practice of leadership.

The situation plays an important role in leadership, yet there exists no comprehensive, well-accepted, and empirically validated framework for modeling leadership situations. This research used situation ratings and narratives from 1,159 leaders to empirically develop a taxonomy of leadership situations. Natural language processing techniques were used to generate psychological situation characteristics that were then rated by leaders. Factor analyses of leader ratings resulted in a taxonomy of psychological leadership situation characteristics with six dimensions (Positive Uniqueness, Importance, Negativity, Scope, Typicality, and Ease). Topic modeling of leader narratives provided a preliminary accompanying typology of structural leadership situation cue combinations (Market/Business Needs, Barriers to Effectiveness, Interpersonal Resources, Deviations/Changes, Team Objectives, and Logistics). To facilitate the measurement of the perceptions of situations, we developed a 27-item measure of the six dimensions of psychological leadership situation characteristics: the Leadership Situation Questionnaire (LSQ). We used the LSQ to conduct initial tests of the nomological network of psychological leadership situation characteristics by assessing their relationships with leader personality, leader behavior, outcomes of leadership situations, and structural leadership situation cue combinations. The psychological leadership situation characteristics taxonomy and the resulting measure (the LSQ) provide an organizing framework for existing leadership research, lay a foundation for future research on situation-related leadership hypotheses, and offer important practical implications in areas such as leader assessment and development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Examining Multiteam Systems Across Context and Type: A Historiometric Analysis of Failed MTS Performance.

Multiteam systems (MTSs) are complex organizational forms comprising interdependent teams that work towards their own proximal goals within and across teams to also accomplish a shared superordinate goal. MTSs operate within high-stakes, dangerous contexts with high consequences for suboptimal performance. We answer calls for nuanced exploration and cross-context comparison of MTSs "in the wild" by leveraging the MTS action sub-phase behavioral taxonomy to determine where and how MTS failures occur. To our knowledge, this is the first study to also examine how key MTS attributes (boundary status, goal type) influence MTS processes and performance. We conducted historiometric analysis on 40 cases of failed MTS performance across various contexts (e.g., emergency response, commercial transportation, military, and business) to uncover patterns of within- and between-team behaviors of failing MTSs, resulting in four themes. First, component teams of failing MTSs over-engaged in within-team alignment behaviors (vs. between-team behaviors) by enacting acting, monitoring, and recalibrating behaviors more often within than between teams. Second, failing MTSs over-focused on acting behaviors (vs. monitoring or recalibrating) and tended to not fully enact the action sub-phase cycle. Third and fourth, boundary status and goal type exacerbated these behavioral patterns, as external and physical MTSs were less likely to enact sufficient between-team behaviors or fully enact the action sub-phase cycle compared to internal and intellectual MTSs. We propose entrainment as a mechanism for facilitating MTS performance wherein specific, cyclical behavioral patterns enacted by teams align to facilitate goal achievement via three multilevel behavioral cycles (i.e., acting-focused, alignment-focused, and adjustment-focused). We argue that the degree to which these cycles are aligned both between teams and with the overarching MTS goal determines whether and how an MTS fails. Our findings add nuance beyond single-context MTS studies by showing that the identified behavioral patterns hold both across contexts and almost all types of MTS action-phase behaviors. We show that these patterns vary by MTS boundary status and goal type. Our findings inform MTS training best practices, which should be structured to integrate all component teams and tailored to both MTS attributes (i.e., boundary status, goal type) and situation type (e.g., contingency planning).

Organizational science and cybersecurity: abundant opportunities for research at the interface.

Cybersecurity is an ever-present problem for organizations, but organizational science has barely begun to enter the arena of cybersecurity research. As a result, the "human factor" in cybersecurity research is much less studied than its technological counterpart. The current manuscript serves as an introduction and invitation to cybersecurity research by organizational scientists. We define cybersecurity, provide definitions of key cybersecurity constructs relevant to employee behavior, illuminate the unique opportunities available to organizational scientists in the cybersecurity arena (e.g., publication venues that reach new audiences, novel sources of external funding), and provide overall conceptual frameworks of the antecedents of employees' cybersecurity behavior. In so doing, we emphasize both end-users of cybersecurity in organizations and employees focused specifically on cybersecurity work. We provide an expansive agenda for future organizational science research on cybersecurity-and we describe the benefits such research can provide not only to cybersecurity but also to basic research in organizational science itself. We end by providing a list of potential objections to the proposed research along with our responses to these objections. It is our hope that the current manuscript will catalyze research at the interface of organizational science and cybersecurity.

Leadership in applied psychology: Three waves of theory and research.

Although in the early years of the Journal leadership research was rare and focused primarily on traits differentiating leaders from nonleaders, subsequent to World War II the research area developed in 3 major waves of conceptual, empirical, and methodological advances: (a) behavioral and attitude research; (b) behavioral, social-cognitive, and contingency research; and (c) transformational, social exchange, team, and gender-related research. Our review of this work shows dramatic increases in sophistication from early research focusing on personnel issues associated with World War I to contemporary multilevel models and meta-analyses on teams, shared leadership, leader-member exchange, gender, ethical, abusive, charismatic, and transformational leadership. Yet, many of the themes that characterize contemporary leadership research were also present in earlier research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Charting a course for collaboration: a multiteam perspective.

The translation of medical research from bench-to-bedside often requires integrated input from multiple expert teams. These collectives can best be understood through the lens of multiteam systems theory. Team charters are a practical tool thought to facilitate team performance through the creation of explicit shared norms for behavior. We extend the current literature on team charters to the multiteam context and make three practical recommendations for multiteam charter content that could facilitate effective communication and leadership processes between teams.

Perspective: teams won't solve this problem.

OBJECTIVE: We link the problem of complex sociotechnical systems to a new unit-of-analysis and fruitful developing area of applied research, the multiteam system. BACKGROUND: Teams are the dominant entity and theoretical lens being applied to understanding the performance of complex sociotechnical systems. We submit that such problems cannot be solved through the teams lens because complex sociotechnical systems exhibit features such as mixed-motive goal structures and complex, layered social identities that do not meet the definitional requirements of a team. METHOD: We present key findings from multiteam systems research and review the studies contained in the special issue on the basis of the focal constructs and unit of analysis. RESULTS: Although progress is being made on understanding key constructs essential to understanding complex sociotechnical systems, the unit of analysis needs to be shifted upward from the team level to the system level. CONCLUSION: Progress on understanding the inner workings and leverage points for the success of complex sociotechnical systems requires a fundamental shift in the unit of analysis toward understanding the macrodynamics of larger systems of teams. APPLICATION: The multiteam system perspective offers a useful theoretical lens for future research on and tool development (e.g., training, information technology) for improving the functioning of complex sociotechnical systems.

Trait-based perspectives of leadership.

The trait-based perspective of leadership has a long but checkered history. Trait approaches dominated the initial decades of scientific leadership research. Later, they were disdained for their inability to offer clear distinctions between leaders and nonleaders and for their failure to account for situational variance in leadership behavior. Recently, driven by greater conceptual, methodological, and statistical sophistication, such approaches have again risen to prominence. However, their contributions are likely to remain limited unless leadership researchers who adopt this perspective address several fundamental issues. The author argues that combinations of traits and attributes, integrated in conceptually meaningful ways, are more likely to predict leadership than additive or independent contributions of several single traits. Furthermore, a defining core of these dominant leader trait patterns reflects a stable tendency to lead in different ways across disparate organizational domains. Finally, the author summarizes a multistage model that specifies some leader traits as having more distal influences on leadership processes and performance, whereas others have more proximal effects that are integrated with, and influenced by, situational parameters.

The impact of cross-training on team effectiveness.

The authors examined the role of cross-training in developing shared team-interaction mental models, coordination, and performance in a 2-experiment study using computer simulation methodology (for Experiment 1, N = 45 teams; for Experiment 2, N = 49 teams). Similar findings emerged across the 2 experiments. First, cross-training enhanced the development of shared team-interaction models. Second, coordination mediated the relationship between shared mental models and team performance. However, there was some inconsistency in the findings concerning the depth of cross-training necessary for improving shared mental models. Results are discussed in terms of the impact of different levels of cross-training on team effectiveness.