This volume of the annual series on work teams focuses on leadership. A number of experts in academia and in business agree that leadership is the key to effective work teams. However, they do not necessarily agree on what is meant by 'leadership', how leadership should be enacted, or what constitutes a 'team'. The world of work is changing, and with it, the nature of leadership or our understanding of it is changing. There has been some evolution of leadership concepts and practices toward a more empowering approach focusing on the employees as human resources, but the older command and control approach is only slowly being replaced in research literature and business practices. The authors of the papers in this volume are at the cutting edge with their thinking, writing, and validation work on new approaches to understanding leadership. Subjects addressed in these papers include: team citizenship behavior; self-leadership, self-managed teams and shared leadership; transformational leadership; organizational culture as expressed in the behavior of team members; and, decision making in top management teams. The final chapter emphasizes the training of leaders and teams. These papers each contribute valuable insights and perspectives to both the researcher planning further study of team leadership and the practitioner who must produce performance enhancing change with work teams.
