Switching gears: How teams co-construct adaptive leadership style transitions in dynamic contexts

Despite agreement among leadership scholars that the effectiveness of a leadership style is situationally dependent, little is known about the process of effectively switching among different leadership styles as situations unexpectedly change. Organizations rely heavily on teams to quickly and accurately adapt in dynamic contexts, and we focus here on clarifying the process of adaptive leadership style transitions in teams as they cope with situations unexpectedly shifting from requiring process efficiency to requiring collective sensemaking. We review and build on pertinent literature to develop a process model depicting switching among leadership styles not as an isolated act of a team leader, but as interdependent behaviors of a leader and team members in co-constructing the adaptive switching process. We offer testable propositions derived from the model that delineate variables influencing the adaptive leadership process and team adaptive performance. Finally, we discuss future research and practical implications based on the model's exploration. Organizations depend on teams to pivot quickly when situations unexpectedly change. In some situations, teams must be as efficient as possible; in others, teams must work together to make sense of chaos. Little is known regarding why some teams can quickly switch back and forth among these situations, while other teams stumble. In this paper, we explain how the team leader and team members of adaptive teams work together to co-construct an adaptive switching process that allows the team to accurately sense when a switch is needed and switch leadership behaviors for both leader and team members when the situation so warrants.