Bradley Kirkman

Professor

Bradley L. Kirkman is the General (Ret.) H. Hugh Shelton Distinguished Professor of Leadership in the Department of Management, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship at the Poole College of Management, North Carolina State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on leadership, team empowerment, cross-cultural management, and the effectiveness of remote and hybrid teams. He has published extensively in top journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Leadership Quarterly.
Bradley is the author of 3D Team Leadership: A New Approach for Complex Teams and Unbreakable: Building and Leading Resilient Teams, both published by Stanford University Press. He has served as Chief Operating Officer and Past Division Chair of the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management and has held academic positions at Texas A&M University, Georgia Tech, and UNC Greensboro.

It Takes Two to Make a Team Go Right

Today’s teams often have two formal leaders (i.e., dual leaders), yet research has almost exclusively examined the effects of a single, higher-level team leader’s behaviors on team members and team outcomes. This is problematic because these findings cannot unequivocally be applied to guide the use of dual-leader team structures. Using 93 professional service (i.e., audit) action teams, we examine effects of partner (i.e., external) and manager (i.e., internal) leaders simultaneously exhibiting initiating structure and individualized consideration leadership behaviors on team efficacy and, ultimately, team performance and team viability. Our findings show that the total capacity of leadership effects for a team with two leaders is only captured after considering the influence from both leaders simultaneously, especially when examining interactive effects between an individual leader’s behaviors and across two leaders’ behaviors. We find team efficacy is strengthened when the partner alone exhibits both higher structure and consideration, which is further augmented when the manager also exhibits higher consideration simultaneously. Thus, we find dual-leader interactions demonstrating the “Power of the Partner” and “Power of Consideration” effects are critical for building team efficacy, and in turn, team performance and team viability in dual-leader structures, revealing the existence of meaningful leadership interactions that cannot be found in single-leader studies.

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Leadership behaviors by partners and managers, and audit team performance

Leadership research in the organizational behavior (OB) literature has generally focused on single-leader teams. Yet many organization, including audit firms, have more complex dual leader structures in which leadership duties are shared between two team leaders. We study this in the context of audit teams in which the dual leaders are the audit partner and the audit manager. We find some evidence that division of labor in leadership behaviors is effective. However, the most effective audit teams are those in which both the partner and manager have what are called “consideration” behaviors that exhibit a concern for the welfare of team members. We call this “the power of consideration.” This finding makes sense given that audit teams come together for short periods of time, and there is a need for the audit team to feel confident in order to be effective. The other condition in which audit teams perform well is when the partner exhibits strong leadership behaviors for both initiating structure (defining goals, communication channels, time-lines) and consideration, irrespective of the manager’s leadership behaviors. We call this the “super partner” effect. Overall, the results point to active engagement by partners and managers with the audit team as being the most effective leadership behaviors. While initiating structure behaviors are important, consideration behaviors are far more important in audit teams, a finding which differs from prior OB research. Finally, the results underscore the importance of training partners and managers in the effective use of consideration behaviors to build team confidence and to ensure the best audit team performance.

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