Leadership and teamwork gurus who tell you to always project a positive attitude may be wrong, according to a study by American and Canadian organizational researchers.
The scientists gave a challenge to 56 teams of college students that had been operating as self-managed teams for school projects: assemble a tent blind-folded. By "self-managed," the researchers meant the members "conducted meetings, outlined task procedures, assigned tasks to members, and handled interpersonal issues." On self-managed teams, different people take the lead on different tasks based on expertise, so the researchers randomly selected a member of each team and gave that person very basic instructions for assembling the tent (not step-by-step procedures). Then they told the leaders this experiment was about memory, and showed them a short video from which the leaders supposedly would be asked to recall things after the tent-raising.
In reality, the videos were meant to affect the leaders' moods. Some leaders saw a comedy clip, while the others saw part of a "documentary about social injustice and aggression." Meanwhile the team members were tested for their moods. After the leaders went back to their teams and held strategy sessions, the teams built their tents while being rated on their performance. The researchers tested the team members' mood again after the strategy session and both before and after the tent-building.
Leader moods had a major impact on the moods of their fellow team members. The mood of the leader also directly affected the team's performance, but not in the way you would expect. Teams with leaders in good moods coordinated their work better, and were somewhat better at strategizing how to build the tent. However, teams with leaders in bad moods worked harder, and performed slightly better overall (though the difference was not mathematically significant).
The authors note that constant long-term bad moods can harm team members' abilities to work together on other tasks. For example, a task requiring a high level of coordination would be hurt by a negative leader. They suggest that a leader must learn to regulate his or her moods and/or the expression of them according to the circumstances.
Source: Sy, T., S. Cote, and R. Saavedra (05), "The Contagious Leader: Impact of the Leader's Mood on the Mood of Group Members, Group Affective Tone, and Group Processes," Journal of Applied Psychology 90(2):295.
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© 2009 by Jim Morgan. All rights reserved.