Team leadership activities in different project phases

Abstract

Flexible and highly integrated team‐based organizational designs are often seen as the necessary response to increasing technological and market complexities and dynamics. Building on the extant literature on team leadership, we specify and categorize leadership activities that are seen as critical to teamwork and performance in project teams. Based on an empirical study on a large‐scale project comprising 39 teams, we show how these leadership activities are carried out in the course of a project. The results indicate that individual teams did change in how strongly they performed the various leadership activities. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.