Extreme Teaming

Viewing teaming as a process, the authors describe project teams that cross disciplinary, organizational, and industry boundaries to innovate. They contend that leadership is key to this extreme type of teaming and present qualitative research to understand the leadership functions allowing for success in these challenging situations. They consider how diverse groups of people collaborate to accomplish challenging innovation goals, requiring them to master new content, build new relationships, and integrate their ideas and expertise to produce high-value output, first discussing the need for extreme teaming, the main team leadership theories and the need for a taxonomy centered on the extreme teaming context, and team development and team diversity. They then present their findings from a multiyear study of various industries, to enumerate four interdependent leadership functions fostering extreme teaming and innovation results: building an engaging vision, cultivating psychological safety, developing shared mental models, and empowering agile execution. They end with a section on the implications of the findings and a model of the four functions. -- Annotation ©2017 * (protoview.com) *