ABSTRACT
Team leadership is essential for team effectiveness. The contribution of leadership to effective team performance rests on the extent to which team leaders help members achieve a synergistic threshold, where collective effort accomplishes more than the sum of individual abilities or efforts. Collins and Guetzkow (1964) defined such a threshold in decision-making groups as reflecting an “assembly bonus,” where decisions emerging from group interaction are superior in quality to those made by the group’s most capable member (see also Michaelson, Watson, & Black, 1989). Groups and teams rarely achieve a synergistic threshold, or the assembly bonus (Hill, 1982), primarily because of process loss (Steiner, 1972). Process losses can be attributed to the failure of team members to develop the best means of combining their individual capabilities in a concerted direction or to the unwillingness or inability of members to exert sufficient levels of individual effort (ibid.). The activities of effective team leadership, therefore, need to center on providing the direction for collective action and on helping teams reach and maintain a state of minimal process loss (cf. Gardner & Schermerhorn, 1992; Jacobs & Jaques, 1990).
