Examining the Team/Leader Interface

Abstract

The authors propose that baseball teams serve as exemplars of postmodern organizations, such that studying the team/leader interface on baseball teams would be analogous to studying these relationships in other postmodern organizations. Furthermore, the authors argue that traditional leadership theories (for example, contingent rewards) may not apply to postmodern organizations nor may theories that rely on the development of long-term relationships between superiors and subordinates (for example, vertical dyad linkages). Rather, the authors propose a new model of leadership that responds to the needs of postmodern organizations, wherein leaders perform leadership through ritualized behavior, engage in transformational leadership, and effectively manage the autonomy-interdependence dialectic.