Team-Centric Leadership: An Integrative Review

Abstract

This integrative review focuses on leadership in the context of work groups and teams: team-centric leadership. Although the process of leadership is largely viewed as one of social influence, most theories of leadership are agnostic about the social units and context within which it occurs. The review examines recent research on mainstream leadership theories—transformational leadership and leader-member exchange—that have contextualized leadership in work teams and also on team-centric leadership theories—shared and functional leadership—that are explicitly team centric. For each theory, we examine its conceptualization and evolution, how well it maps to the input-process-output heuristic of team effectiveness (including moderators indicative of the context, process dynamics, and feedback loops), and the quality of research methods that are employed. The discussion concludes with 14 recommendations designed to advance each type of team-centric leadership and to promote more integration and synergy across the approaches in future research.