Emergent Team Leadership

Emergent Team Leadership ETL looks at leadership, not from the point of view of the leader but from the perspective of team members – it is their ‘evaluation’ of their leader. We have structured this evaluation based on three forms of ‘authority’. We use the term authority to cover ‘influence’ and ‘respect’ indicating formal and informal forms of authority.

1. There is authority given to the team leader by the organisation. This formal authority can be seen in a job title and the fact that the leader can legitimately control and ‘manage’ team members. We refer to this formal authority as Transactional authority.
2. The second form of authority or influence is informal and based on team members perception of the team leader’s credibility, does the leader know and understand what they are doing. Basically, the team leader’s managerial skills and knowledge as perceived by team members. In team members eyes their leader’s expertise gives them credibility. We refer to this dimension as Expert authority.
3. The third form of authority is based on the social and emotional rewards that team members experience (or do not experience) when working alongside their team leader. For example, do team members feel motivated and do they share the same values as their team leader. In many ways this is the essence of leadership. We refer to this informal, but important, dimension as Expert authority. The greater the social and emotional rewards team members experience the greater the team leader’s authority or influence.

We are going to go into much more detail about the background to the three dimensions described above in the book and further down the text.

Ideal Types

In the social sciences we often refer to pure examples of expected behaviours. They may not reflect the real complex world but helps us understand what is happening or not happening - why the expected behaviours did not materialise for example. Max Weber 1864-1920 called these abstractions Ideal Types, perhaps better described from the German language as Idea Types or mental constructions.

If we apply ‘ideal types’ to the three dimensions described above Transactional, Expert and Reward, we can come up with a simple description that helps us understand what is happening. 
Ideal Types comes up with the following:

Team members accept Transactional authority, willingly accept Expert authority and willingly and enthusiastically accept Reward authority.

Social life is never that simple, but it gives us a mental framework through which we understand what is going on in the minds of team members.