Explain how intergroup dynamics can impact on a group’s effectiveness

How Shared leadership changes relationships at work Consider the challenges of the 21st century enterprise: things change too fast for one individual to know how to best respond; there are many explanations for any event, and multiple perspectives are needed to understand what that event means and decide what to do; a pipeline of future leaders is essential to companies’ long term success. No wonder organisations today are drawn to the benefit of leadership that is shared, rather than concentrated in a single, charismatic individual. Regardless of the exact organisational structure or what it’s called, the times seem to call for leaders who can be first among equals. This is more than delegation. It has to do with a team sharing a sense of purpose and responsibility for the overall leadership of the company. Different people may spearhead different aspects of the team’s work, but everyone is in charge, always. Recent research on change management teams, virtual teams and new start-up teams has shown that teams in which leadership is shared, rather than vested on a single individual, can be very effective, demonstrating through quantitative methods that shared leadership can, and does, lead to improved organisational performance. And yet organisations remain stubbornly hierarchical. Anyone who has tried to share the burdens and privileges of leadership in their teams has probably noticed that doing so is far from straightforward. Over the last decade, assisting the leadership development of many senior executives attempting the transition to shared leadership, I have often noticed the same phenomenon. While everyone welcomes the idea, a culture of shared leadership does not easily flourish. Relationships between team members. Moving to shared leadership transforms the way decisions are made and changes relationship between team members. While they may welcome having the authority to oversee the whole business, Executive VPs will find it harder to oversee each other. Used to reporting directly to you, they may be reluctant to accept and exercise the authority to hold each other accountable for the performance of their function or business unit. They may collude in not giving each other a hard time, waiting for you to step in. This will box you into being the bearer of bad news, unless you make it clear that they must both support and challenge each other, rather than doing the former only. Groups generally have a couple of ways of dealing with the unease of these new relationships; both have their dysfunctions. The first is for team members to form sub-groups and talk mostly with those with whom they are already comfortable, while ignoring or undermining the others. The second is to scapegoat a particular individual or team, and to make him or her the reason for all delays and dysfunctions. HR and IT are favourites, but it could be anyone. The worst thing you can do is join in. Your job is to judge when sub-groups are a useful way to split the team’s load, and when they’re a destructive way to avoid controversial issues. Faced with what appears a subpar team member or underperforming group, you need to work out to what extent the scapegoat is not up to scratch, and to what extent the rest of the team is simply labelling them incompetent so they can feel superior.