Not all teams are created equal, and some are just not as successful as others. Usually, a team’s performance, whether good or bad, is attributed to its leader, who is considered responsible for how the people under his guidance work toward the common goal. At the same time, team members may also lack the skills or motivation to infest sufficient efforts into their individual tasks. Both these factors, in the shape of an inefficient leader and poorly motivated team members, combined to form the least successful team I participated in, resulting in failure.
The team I speak of was organized of several class members for a school project. The nature of the project itself is not essential for this analysis, yet the way the team approached it is. The end result of the project had to be a paper, and the team decided to split the parts – such as introduction, literature review, methods, discussion, and so forth – between its members. The team’s leader was also expected to provide his part, which meant he had to combine direction and participation successfully. As far as I am aware, combining these roles is a frequent occurrence in leading knowledge-intensive projects. Thus, such an approach in itself was not unusual and not necessarily predicted a failure.
However, not everyone in the team was equally prepared or motivated to participate in the project efficiently. The person in charge of the literature review section did not pay attention to the instructions, and more than half of all sources turned out to be inadmissible. The one responsible for the introduction made it too vague and, as a result, failed to describe the importance of the project. Apart from that, the entire team was not particularly well-motivated, as hardly anyone except for the reader perceived the project as important. To use a managerial science term, it was a low-incentive project when the perceived rewards for the team members are low, and the cost of failure is not too high. All these shortcomings could have been alleviated if the leader had taken the time to control and aid each team member in their respective tasks, but it proved problematic as well.
The team leader opted for a hands-off approach, trusting that each of the team members would complete his or her part of the project well. This decision might have been informed by the fact that the leader was the only one actually interested and motivated to work on the project. In other words, he had chosen a participatory style of leadership, when the leader allows the team members to freely choose their level of effort invested in the project. However, as mentioned above, the team members’ individual motivations were sorely lacking, as the team perceived the project as low-takes and unrewarding. In such cases, dictionary leadership, which demands the team members to exert higher effort than they would have chosen voluntarily, is generally more effective. However, the leader failed twice: to understand the low incentive level of the team and to choose a leadership strategy appropriate for that incentive level. The result was an unmotivated and not efficiently controlled team that presented a low-quality project.
To summarize, the team discussed in this paper had two factors that precipitated its failure. Firstly, team members perceived the project as low-incentive and unrewarding and, as such, were not willing to exert themselves. Secondly, the team’s leader did not identify this problem, which resulted in adopting the participatory leadership style that could have worked with a better-motivated team but resulted in failure under the given circumstances.