PSYCH 668 Week 4 Team and Shared Leadership Example

Five Leads, Two Shifts and One Problem: Building Shared Leadership on a Warehouse Accuracy Team

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/668: Organizational Development, Leadership, and Management

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The distributor, the team and all figures are composites written for a model paper; theories and research findings come from the sources listed.

Voice-directed picking launched six weeks ago. Speed improved, but picking errors, such as wrong items or quantities sent to stores, remain at about 1.4 percent of lines, well above the 0.5 percent target. Errors cost us credits, returned loads and angry customers. The causes cross shifts and departments: product placement, labeling, headset prompts and training. No single supervisor can solve the problem, so I proposed a team.

The Team

The accuracy team includes five leads: Teresa and one other veteran from night shift, two day-shift leads promoted in the last year and the lead from the receiving dock, where mislabeled pallets start many errors. The team meets weekly for an hour, with authority to change slotting, labels and training within a modest budget, and reports monthly to Greg, the president. Its goal is to bring errors below 0.5 percent within four months.

What a Team Needs From Leadership

Morgeson et al. (2010) proposed a functional approach to team leadership, arguing that leadership is whatever is needed to satisfy the team's critical needs, whoever provides it. They described two phases of team work. During transition phases, teams need someone to compose the team, define its mission, set goals and expectations, structure and plan the work, train members, help the team make sense of events and give feedback. During action phases, teams need monitoring, management of boundaries with the rest of the organization, challenge to the status quo, problem solving, resources, encouragement of self-management and support for a healthy social climate.

They also classified sources of leadership by whether they are formal or informal and inside or outside the team. Leadership can come from a formal team leader, from members sharing it informally, from a manager outside the team or from external mentors and sponsors.

Mapping the Functions

Using the functional list, I mapped who should cover each need. I will handle transition functions at the start: composing the team, drafting a mission and helping set the target. Greg, as an external formal leader, should provide resources, protect the team's authority and remove obstacles across departments, such as getting purchasing to change label vendors. Inside the team, action functions such as monitoring error data, solving problems and challenging assumptions will be shared among the leads, with Teresa likely to provide much of the social climate support.

Should Leadership Be Shared?

Wang et al. (2014) meta-analyzed studies of shared leadership and team effectiveness. Across forty-two samples, shared leadership was positively related to team effectiveness, and the relationship was stronger when team work was more complex. Newer forms of shared leadership, such as shared transformational or empowering behaviors, related more strongly to effectiveness than traditional forms focused on task direction.

Our team's task is complex: errors have several interacting causes, and each lead knows part of the picture. The evidence supports sharing leadership rather than appointing one lead as boss of the others, which might also create resentment between shifts.

No one on this team sees the whole error problem, which is the strongest argument for letting leadership move to whoever sees the relevant part.

How Sharing Will Work

Sharing leadership does not mean leaving roles undefined. Facilitation will rotate monthly, starting with Teresa, who has the most experience. Each error source will have an owner: receiving for labels, a day lead for slotting, a night lead for headset prompts and another day lead for training. Decisions will be made by consensus where possible; if the team cannot agree after discussion, the facilitator will decide and record the reasoning. I will attend as a nonvoting member to help with data.

Making It Safe to Admit Errors

Edmondson (1999) followed fifty-one teams at a single manufacturer and introduced team psychological safety: members' common sense that speaking up will not cost them standing or invite punishment. Where that sense was strong, teams did more of what learning requires, from asking for feedback to talking openly about mistakes and hunting for information, and teams with those habits tended to perform better. Leaders who coached, and organizations that backed their teams, saw more of it.

Psychological safety is a serious concern on our team. Leads have learned over two years that errors appear on scorecards and that scorecards lead to blame. If leads hide errors from their own crews or downplay their shift's problems in front of the other shift, the team will fail.

Building Safety

I plan three steps. First, the team's first meeting will begin with each lead describing an error their own crew made recently and what they learned, starting with Teresa, who agreed to go first. Second, error data shared within the team will not be used in individual performance reviews, a commitment Greg has agreed to put in writing. Third, Greg will attend one meeting a month, not to review numbers but to ask what the team needs, a structured opportunity for the coaching behavior Edmondson linked to safety.

Risks

Shared leadership can drift if no one feels accountable. Rotating facilitation and clear ownership of error sources reduce that risk. The two newer day leads may defer to veterans, so the facilitator will invite their views first on each issue. And if Greg overrides team decisions, the team will learn that its authority is not real, so any reversal must be explained in person.

Measuring Team Effectiveness

The team will track three outcomes: error rate by shift and cause each week, completion of agreed actions and a short quarterly survey of team members on safety, workload and satisfaction with the team. I will also ask crews whether they notice changes, since an effective team should be visible beyond its meetings.

What Teresa's Role Shows

Teresa's position illustrates the functional model well. She has no formal authority over the other leads, yet she already performs several action-phase functions: she supports the team's social climate, challenges assumptions and solves problems. Shared leadership formalizes what she has done informally for years, while giving newer leads the chance to develop the same capacities.

The First Month

The team's first month should be about understanding the problem before fixing it. Leads will pull a sample of two hundred error reports, classify each by likely cause and walk the floor together on both shifts to see where errors start. Only after that diagnosis will owners propose changes. This sequence matters because leads arrive with confident theories that blame the other shift or the receiving dock, and shared data is the fastest way to replace blame with a common picture. Early, visible fixes, such as relabeling the twenty locations with the most errors, will also show crews that the team can deliver.

Conclusion

A complex, cross-shift problem calls for a team whose leadership functions are deliberately mapped and shared, with a formal leader outside the team who provides resources and protection. Evidence on shared leadership and psychological safety supports rotating facilitation, clear ownership and early work to make it safe to admit errors.

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

Morgeson, F. P., DeRue, D. S., & Karam, E. P. (2010). Leadership in teams: A functional approach to understanding leadership structures and processes. Journal of Management, 36(1), 5-39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206309347376

Wang, D., Waldman, D. A., & Zhang, Z. (2014). A meta-analysis of shared leadership and team effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(2), 181-198. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034531