Imagine that you, as a mid-level manager in your company, have been assigned to a six-person team asked to complete a top-priority project on a very short deadline. As it turns out, some of the people have never worked together before, members of the team change every hour or so, leadership constantly shifts between three different individuals, and any mistake by even one person could have disastrous, even fatal, consequences for the project's outcome.
Wharton management professor Katherine J. Klein spent 10 months studying such teams in action at the Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Md., a world-renowned urban facility that treats more than 7,000 patients each year, most of whom arrive with severe, often life-threatening injuries. The project and research were funded by the U.S. Army Research Institute as part of its efforts to gather information about leadership strategies for teams working in highly dynamic and stressful situations. The results of this research are presented in a paper titled, "A Leadership System for Emergency Action Teams: Rigid Hierarchy and Dynamic Flexibility," co-authored by Klein, Jonathan C. Ziegert, a visiting scholar at Wharton, Andrew P. Knight, a Wharton doctoral student, and Yan Xiao, a professor and lead researcher at the School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore.
Klein and her colleagues studied the trauma resuscitation unit as a way to analyze team leadership in diverse settings. "It is surprising that there hasn't been much research on team leadership, because there is lots of research on teams and lots of research on leadership," Klein says, adding that traditional research is usually based on "dominant" or "transformational" models which emphasize the leader's "inspirational" role in motivating his or her followers and which assume a long-term leader-follower relationship.
Yet in many current organizations, the researchers note in their paper, these "emphases and assumptions appear increasingly inapt.
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