Team of Champions or a Champion Team? Leading Teams

Hans Westerbeek and Aaron Smith

Chapter Chapter 4 in Business Leadership and the Lessons from Sport, 2005, pp 71-93 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The imperatives associated with leading sport teams have often been considered a metaphor for leading any team to success. Teams are commonplace in most organizations, precisely because the ability to leverage and mobilize the collective knowledge of employees has long been accepted as prudent management and sound leadership. The use of well-organized teams has been linked to improvements in business innovation, productivity and levels of customer service. This chapter therefore seeks to demonstrate the value and importance of effective team leadership, as illustrated by the plethora of sporting metaphors used to describe the process. It will also observe that while collective identification lies at the heart of team development, a critical fault of many team leadership approaches is their intentional or implicit advice to completely suppress individuality in favor of the collective. While the team is naturally more important than any individual, we shall point out the critical nature of the individual contribution in sport teams and the subtle but dynamic tension that exists between variables within the continuum spanning from the individual to the “groupthink” cult.

Keywords: Team Member; Sport Team; Leadership Style; Collective Identity; Team Structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-52441-5_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230524415

DOI: 10.1057/9780230524415_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().