PSY 435 Week 5 Leadership and Work Teams Example

From Best Installer to Crew Lead: Leadership and Team Learning on Solar Crews

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSY/435: Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The company, staff and figures are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Organizations depend on leaders and teams to turn individual effort into collective results. This final paper examines what happened when Desert Sun Solar promoted its best installers to lead new crews and what research on leadership and teams suggests for doing it better.

The Promotions

To manage twelve new crews, Desert Sun promoted twelve of its most skilled installers to crew lead. Results varied widely. Four crews thrived, with low callbacks, strong safety audits and low turnover. Five were average. Three struggled: their leads did much of the work themselves, criticized mistakes publicly and announced decisions without explanation. On those crews, installers rarely reported near misses, and two of the three had the highest quit rates found in the Week 4 analysis.

Why Technical Skill Is Not Enough

Promoting top performers into leadership is common and often reasonable, but the skills that make an excellent installer, speed, precision and independence, differ from those that make an effective leader, such as coaching, explaining, delegating and building trust. The struggling leads were excellent installers who continued to act as installers.

Comparing Leadership Approaches

Trait approaches sought characteristics that distinguish leaders; some, such as conscientiousness and extraversion, relate modestly to leadership. Behavioral approaches distinguished task-oriented from relationship-oriented behavior. Contingency approaches argued that effective behavior depends on the situation, such as the team's experience. Transformational leaders paint a picture of where the group is headed, live the standards they set, push people to question old ways and coach each person individually. Transactional leadership centers on exchanges: clarifying expectations and rewarding performance, called contingent reward, or monitoring and correcting errors.

What the Evidence Shows

Judge and Piccolo (2004) combined studies of transformational and transactional leadership. Leaders rated high on the inspiring style had followers who liked them, worked hard for them and judged them effective. Contingent reward, recognizing good work when it happens, predicted nearly as well and sometimes better, and leaders who did one usually did the other too. Passive leadership, avoiding decisions and acting only when problems become serious, was negatively related to outcomes.

For Desert Sun, the findings suggest that effective crew leads need not be charismatic visionaries. Clarifying expectations, recognizing good work promptly and explaining the purpose of the job, such as helping families cut energy costs, can all be learned. The thriving leads did exactly these things.

Why Some Crews Learn and Others Hide Mistakes

Edmondson (1999) surveyed and observed dozens of teams in an office furniture manufacturer and found that some teams shared a sense that raising a worry or owning up to a slip would draw support, not punishment, a climate Edmondson called psychological safety. Those teams reported problems, sought outside input and tested fixes more often, and such teams in turn performed better. Team leader coaching and supportive context contributed to psychological safety.

On Desert Sun's struggling crews, publicly criticized installers stopped reporting near misses, such as a loose anchor or a slipping ladder, because reporting brought blame. On thriving crews, leads thanked installers for raising concerns, and near-miss reports were five times more frequent while actual injuries were lower.

On the safest crews, installers reported the most near misses; the quiet crews were not safer, only silent.

How New Crews Develop

Tuckman (1965) drew on about fifty earlier studies of therapy, training and laboratory groups and described a common path: forming, as members orient to one another; storming, as conflict arises over roles and control; norming, as cohesion and shared standards develop; and performing, as the group focuses on its task. A later addition described adjourning, when groups disband.

Desert Sun's new crews, assembled within weeks, began with uncertainty about roles and then conflict, often over who did the hardest rooftop work in the heat. Leads who recognized storming as a normal stage, and helped crews set fair rotation rules, moved them toward norming faster. Not every crew followed the stages neatly, however; some stalled in conflict until a lead changed.

Leader-Member Relationships

Leader-member exchange theory adds that a leader's ties with followers are not all alike: some become close, trusting partnerships while others stay formal and thin. On two struggling crews, leads relied on one or two trusted veterans and gave newer installers only orders, creating an in-group and an out-group. Out-group members received less information, fewer chances to learn new tasks and harsher correction, and they were the most likely to quit. Effective leads made a point of building working relationships with every installer, rotating who got the more skilled tasks.

Structure Matters Too

Leadership is not the only lever. Crews with the right tools, realistic daily targets and enough people for the day's jobs performed better regardless of lead. Two of the struggling crews were also chronically short one installer, which pushed leads to do the work themselves. Fixing staffing will help those leads change their behavior.

Recommendations

Select leads for leadership, not only skill: add a structured interview and a short team simulation, built from critical incidents of good and poor leadership, to the promotion process.

Train leaders in learnable behaviors: clarifying expectations, recognizing good work, explaining decisions and coaching rather than taking over.

Build psychological safety: begin each day with a five-minute safety huddle where leads ask, "What could hurt us today?" and thank anyone who raises a concern.

Support new crews through development: assign a mentor lead to each new crew for its first two months and set rotation rules early.

Evaluate: track crew-level safety audits, near-miss reports, callbacks and turnover, and survey installers twice a year on their leads' behaviors.

Reflection on the Course

The semester's topics form a chain. Employment law and job analysis shaped whom Desert Sun hired; selection research shaped how; appraisal and training developed people; motivation and fairness research explained who stayed; and leadership and teams determined whether individuals became effective crews.

Conclusion

Desert Sun's mixed results with promoted crew leads show that technical skill does not guarantee leadership. Research shows that both transformational and transactional behaviors, especially contingent reward, support effectiveness, that psychological safety enables team learning and that new teams pass through predictable conflict. Selecting leads for leadership, training learnable behaviors and building safe, learning-oriented crews offer a path to better results.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100