Leadership and team outcomes in the public sector: Team performance, team innovativeness, and team reflexivity

In the public sector, the introduction of teams has become widely popular in recent years. Despite the decentralization of responsibilities that is inherent to teams, leadership is a central determinant of performance in... [ view full abstract ]

In the public sector, the introduction of teams has become widely popular in recent years. Despite the decentralization of responsibilities that is inherent to teams, leadership is a central determinant of performance in teams. In this paper, we examine to what extent visionary leadership contributes to the performance of teams in the public sector. We look at three performance outcomes of the team: team performance, team innovativeness and team reflexivity. We control for alternative explanations for team outcomes (team autonomy, team cohesion, information elaboration and external collaboration), as well as objective team characteristics (team diversity and team size). Our study comprises 1254 welfare professionals and their supervisors across 158 teams in 26 Dutch municipalities. Our dataset is based on multisource data in which the dependent variables (team performance, team innovativeness, and team reflexivity) are measured among the team supervisors, and the independent variables (leadership and teamwork characteristics) are measured among team members and aggregated to the team level. Our findings provide limited support for the expectations that visionary leadership is a determinant of team performance. Self-management, which can be seen as an indicator of distributed leadership, is positively related to team performance and team innovativeness.