Factors affecting the performance of autonomous teams with project leader: a social network approach

Purpose - This study concerns the antecedents of the effectiveness for autonomous inter-organizational (IO) teams guided by leaders adopting a direct leadership behaviour. We analyse the effect of the density of the team social networks and the environmental uncertainty on the team performances. Design/methodology/approach - We propose an approach based on the Ising model developed in statistical physics to simulate the opinion formation process inside the team. Originality/value - Main results show that the density has a beneficial effect on team opinion dispersion, in particular when the environmental uncertainty is high, whereas has respectively a positive or negative influence on the time needed to reach a stable configuration of opinions, when the environmental uncertainty is low or high. Practical implications - In order to improve team effectiveness and speed up the opinion formation process, we suggest to increase the density of the team social networks by means of socialization practices, only in case of low-medium environmental uncertainty. For high uncertainty, we caution that density has a negative effect on the time to reach a solution and in such a case, a moderate level of density should be better.