Waldman et al. found indications that charismatic leadership has a positive influence on organization performance in times of uncertainty. The process leading to this positive macro effect has remained defiant of fitting into a concise model. Perhaps focusing on charismatic leadership effects at a micro level, specifically on team collaboration performance in a post-merger integration setting, may reveal insights to charismatic leadership’s overall ability to improve organizational performance.
In an effort to posit a model of how charismatic leadership influences on collaborative performance in an uncertain environment, we have drawn on Weick’s research of sensemaking’s role in overcoming ambiguity and generating action. Given that sensemaking activities tend to lead to action and specifically improvement of action over time (Weick et al 2005), and that charismatic leadership is coupled with meaning and sensemaking (Podolny et al 2005), we propose the following hypothesis:
In the uncertain environment of PMI, charismatic leadership will moderate a collaborative group’s sensemaking activities. This moderation of sensemaking will drive improvement in the collaboration’s performance.
Conversely, the investigation of team collaboration during post-merger integration has the possibility of addressing charismatic leadership’s impact. Given that collaborative groups have the ability to make sense of their ambiguous situations. It would be interesting to see if an autonomous collaboration’s sensemaking process actualizes an emergent leader – as opposed to having one mandated from corporate management – and how that emergent leadership further influences future sensemaking.
Proposition: A performance enhancing leader will emerge in a newly formed collaborative team that has not been assigned a designated charismatic leader. .
Research model:
A qualitative study to research charismatic leaders’ effect on sensemaking to improve collaborative performance would fill a gap in the literature.
The ideal set-up to would be to take regular qualitative snapshots of two teams’ narrative starting with announcement of the merger and ending with the dissolution of the teams afterPMI has concluded.
First we must control for company culture because each group variation will have a certain bias in making sense of the post-merger integration outcome. There are several different variations of collaborative groups formed during post-merger integration. For example, Company A takes over Company CE and the merged company, ACE, is formed. Teams may be 1) all A members; 2) all B members; 3) mixed members with A culture dominating; 4) mixed members with CE culture dominating; 5) mixed members with no clear domination.
We could choose two similar teams for example number 3: mixed members with A culture dominating. One team would be subject to charismatic leadership input and the second would have no leadership inputs and be left to develop their own story. We would capture the team members’ narrative at the merger announcement and at one month intervals. We would compare the teams’ sensemaking of the ambiguity and then measure overall performance using metrics similar to the following:
• Delivery performance on the basis of requested vs. actual outputs
• Reduced costs stemming from collaboration outputs
• Collaboration’s perception of its increase in value add during PMI
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Linking sensemaking with action is appropriate. Linking sensemaking with improvement in action over time is not a claim that I think Weick et al. would make. People can make sense in dysfunctional ways, and the very mention of “improvement” begs the question of “Improvement relative to what?”
ReplyDeleteSensemaking is too vague as a variable. In a boxes-and-arrows model, sensemaking is more of an explanation—what happens in the arrows between the boxes. In terms of sensemaking actions, what you could do is propose a specific action. For example, one process of sensemaking is enactment, and one way of conceptualizing enactment at this level of analysis might be early strategic moves. For example, you might propose that leaders who act early in integrating post-merger integration create more synergies in performance if they are charismatic leaders, but non-charismatic leaders are more likely to find synergies in performance if they act slowly. I don’t know if I believe this hypothesis myself, but I give it to you as an example. A possible explanation for this might be that charismatic leaders benefit from acting quickly because they galvanize people to accept the sense that they impose upon the merged entity. In contrast, if non-charismatic leaders move quickly, they will be less capable of imposing sense, and so it is better for them to move slowly and transactionally, to allow employees to help them make sense as they go along.
I’m not sure I understand the second proposition. I think you are saying that the dependent variable is not just leader emergence, but the emergence of an effective leader. Is that correct? If it is, what would be the low end of this variable? The emergence of a low-performing leader, or no emergence of a leader at all? What predicts this emergence? Just the fact that it occurs in PMI? Or the fact that it is collaborative? If it is collaborative, what is to prevent distributed leadership from emerging?
There are some good ideas in your research proposal, but the best ideas seem to answer a different question than what you asked. I could imagine you examining the performance of teams designed to take on integration tasks in an acquisition. You would have to find some uniform way to measure performance across teams doing different tasks. Perhaps ratings from executives. You could measure the charisma of team leaders, the ambiguity that each team experiences, and other variables of interest. You could examine how charisma and ambiguity at time 1 interact to influence performance at time 2, 3, or 4. Or, as a more measurable and equally interesting phenomenon, you could measure team members’ identification with the integrated organization as the dependent variable (as identification is one of the dimensions of integration).