Team Structures: Enhancing Creativity and Innovation for Market Success - Essay Sample

Introduction

Modern organizations face the challenge of survival every day in the face of intense market competitiveness. To cope with this situation, they move towards structures that allow them to develop greater flexibility, creativity, and innovation. The teams arise as work units that provide an adequate basis for generating innovative results in a highly competitive environment (Salazar & Lant, 2018). The composition of a team and how individual members work together are critical to achieving that a team is successful in achieving its objectives. The best teams consist of individuals who each contribute their different strengths to teamwork. Team leadership seems to arise in an underlying way since most of the elements attributed to the success of the organizations are largely related to the nature of leaders and their effects on subordinates (Salazar & Lant, 2018). Leadership has traditionally been studied from different perspectives, classified into personal traits approaches, behavioural approaches, situational or contingency approaches. It mainly focuses on the characteristics of the leader and how those characteristics make him competent or not when dealing with situations. That is why these approaches have no specific knowledge about other levels in which leadership also operates, such as followers or relationships with subordinates.

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There is a general acceptance of the idea that effective leadership consists of good relations between leaders and followers so that dyads or positive relationships must be formed with every member of the group (Berson, Da'as & Waldman, 2015). It is critical for a leader to establish positive relationships with the whole group and not just with a few, the leader works with each subordinate in a one-to-one relationship to form teams and positive relationships, by generating a more equitable environment there will be greater benefits for the leader, the followers and the organization. The leader's relationships with his subordinates go beyond interpersonal and intergroup relationships, dyadic theory recommends that the leader's dyads be extended to larger systems, transcending boundaries within organizations. Leaders must devise processes and structures that allow all workers to talk, listen, and reflect together (Berson et al., 2015).

There are benefits of working as a team where the leader and the followers have a working relationship. A condition to be a good follower is to perform the work effectively and efficiently. When this efficiency is not realized, the leader must provide adequate feedback to the followers about the nature of their results. It is necessary to correct the performance deficiencies of a follower to help him improve, but how this is done can undermine how the leader and the follower relate. Recognizing that followers are not a homogeneous group, but individuals with different characteristics can help leaders choose the appropriate feedback methods for their followers. The Leader has to be very specific when considering the deficit, and should systematically discuss the effects of the ineffective behaviour (Berson et al., 2015). Through the discussion, the leader helps the follower in identifying the causes of poor performance and develop alternatives for the problems. Teamwork revolves around the leader. This is who makes sure that the team has the resources a project needs to move it forward. This is the facilitator and moderator in the meetings. Team leaders can count on team members to propose solutions. At the same time members can ask for support in problems, as well as suggestions. The leaders of the teams must be flexible and attentive to any changes, providing solutions for the underlying problem (Berson et al., 2015).

The results and failures of organizations are often attributed to effective or ineffective leadership, even if the followers have been behind good results. Few are the investigations that exist on the role of the followers, it seems that there is not much evidence to support the existence of a perfect and direct relationship between the condition of a good follower and good leadership, however when it is thought to distinguish the teams and organisations with a high performance in average companies, most academics and professionals agree that you have good leaders and good followers. Competent followers are essential for the workgroup or the team of any leader to perform fruitfully. The cognitive style of the leader and team climate for innovation

To understand how leadership can formulate appropriate structures or support the birth of creative and innovative activities, studies on innovation have emphasised the role developed by the cognitive process through which people work with knowledge in generating new solutions and ideas (Martin, Guillaume, Thomas, Lee & Epitropaki, 2016). Specifically, the cognitive style of individuals is defined as the preferred way of doing things.

The theory of cognitive style proposes that individuals may be located in a continuum that has at one end those who prefer the ability to do things better and at the other end those who prefer to do things "differently". The theory of adapters/innovators of Kirton introduces the concept of cognitive style and the difference in capacity or level (Dagnall, Drinkwater, Parker, Denovan, & Parton, 2015). One of the first exposures of the characteristics of adopters and innovators was made by this author, and since then, these characteristics have been thoroughly tested by various researchers (Martin et al., 2016). However, from this whole line of research, there are several criticisms related to the operationalisation and interpretation of the results of the instrument created for this purpose, the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory. Based on these criticisms and to overcome and advance the distinction of logical and intuitive ways of solving problems, Jabri (1991) developed two independent concepts to measure ways of solving problems analogously to the classification of adapters/innovators. To describe the role of leadership in teams, the theory of Leader-member exchange is discussed below.

Leader-Member Exchange and Team Climate for Innovation

In research on innovation and leadership, the leader is considered as a support element whose responsibility is to stimulate the work of others (Herman & Dasborough, 2016). From this point of view, the leader's behaviours and their characteristics (such as cognitive style) could form the basis for the interpretation of organizational features and the consequent behaviour of followers. To know the individual characters of the leaders and the influence climate, we will focus on the literature on relational leadership, and especially on the LMX theory (Herman & Dasborough, 2016).

The leader-member exchange theory (LMX) refers to leadership from a social exchange approach. The central concept of the theory revolves around the fact that a leadership process is effective when leaders and followers can establish mature leadership relationships (called high-quality relationships) so that such relationships allow them to access various benefits. The high-quality relationships of LMX are characterised by being relationships between two individuals, in which both are able to exert considerable influence on each other, enjoy greater access to resources and also obtain greater support and communication open Both, leader and follower, experience reciprocal influence, mutual trust and are willing to develop extra efforts to undertake activities that are not specifically described in their employment contracts (Martin et al., 2016).

The search for innovative and flexible solutions to problems includes a certain degree of experimentation, which requires a positive attitude towards risk and not being afraid to make mistakes. The quality of LMX has been positively related to the tendency of employees to undertake risks (Martin et al., 2016). Specifically, with high-quality relationships, subordinates show a lower tendency to start in routine activities than those involved in low-quality LMX relationships.

Also, the trust inherent in high-quality relationships helps provide a context where followers feel more comfortable for the suggestion of innovative ideas. For instance, Lee Fischer of the Blind Direct traces the success of his company from the team building events that he creates for his team every year. They observed that the suggestion of new ideas is risky behaviour because new ideas represent a change in the established order that invites the evaluation of the rest of the members, and that depending on the quality of the relationships maintained, these ideas could be accepted or rejected. Through LMX's high-quality relationships, leaders exert a strong influence on their followers one by one, so that the more high-quality relationships leaders maintain with each of the team members, the greater the shared perception (Punjaisri & Balmer, 2016).

The leadership is not one-sided, a leader often plays a complementary role of follower. An effective leader will move from leader to follower several times during daily work. For example, in an organization, middle managers respond to the next level of the organization. The way to integrate these functions is an interesting topic with valuable lessons for leadership effectiveness, it is said that the most successful teams are those who have a great change among the followers regarding who performs the functions of a leader at a certain time. Analysing both functions effectively, it is necessary to find a way to integrate them, it is not a simple task due to the high potential for conflicts and ambiguities of the roles. Leaders are responsible for everything that happens in their work unit and they are also asked to delegate a good part of their responsibility and confer authority on their followers to solve the problems on their own, and they are expected to train and develop followers, which means training someone who will finally want the leader's job, even if they are not prepared to perform it (Punjaisri & Balmer, 2016).

New approaches to leadership like the transformational leadership have been developed, to accommodate flexibility within organizations. Through the leadership, culture and vision become the main pillars of success by eliminating the theories of the superman. True leaders identify themselves by motivating their work teams constantly in addition to transmitting their enthusiasm to the team in favour of achievement of organizational objectives seeking to encourage creativity, innovation in the work they carry out tending to generate personal and group value-added.

A good leader has specific characteristics as: extensive education referring to the knowledge acquired during professional and experiential training, generating unlimited and constant curiosity with enthusiasm without limits, having faith in people and in their work team; leading the leader to have a willingness to risk supporting the ideas and projects that arise within the organization always oriented to the mission and vision of the entity.

Conclusion

Leadership models have played a major role in transforming organizations. The main theories that have been a revulsion in investigations are theories of charismatic and transformational leadership. In essence, these theories propose that leaders motivate followers to act beyond your job expectations and they help them achieve high performance, inspiring with the vision articulated by the leader elevated levels of involvement in the group. About charismatic leadership, certain processes have been described, such as articulating an innovative vision of integration, showing unconventional behaviours, adopt personal risks and take into consideration the demands of employees, as well...