El empoderamiento de las mujeres y la equidad de género

One attribute of action research is that even if a clear plan and a methodology are proposed for the thesis work, many uncertainties could remain because the investigation is undertaken in an industrial organisation, and organisations change over time. For the core action research projects, four self-organising teams were evaluated. After evaluating the gathered data, it became clear that the decision-making attribute for all of the teams was in the quadrant of low shared leadership.

As described in the different action research cycles in chapter 7, the shared leadership decision-making attribute of a team should be only as good as the decision-making capabilities of the surrounding management team (Bergman et al., 2012). This was not confirmed by the study; with regard to the decision making attribute, the management team exhibited leadership avoidance, whereas the teams exhibited low shared leadership. At the

beginning of the study, the evaluation of the organisational management team was not planned. However, this evaluation became necessary because of the findings. The result described in section 7.5 indicates that the management team showed leadership avoidance. This might be why the decision-making attribute for the different investigated teams was in the quadrant of low shared leadership, which is still at the shared leadership level but only at a low level.

A second change during the course of the action research projects was that only two of the four teams remained in the original form; two teams were dissolved because the team members moved to other teams or were assigned to other tasks that had a higher priority in the organisation. Finally, only two teams were left for the second action research cycle (Teams E3 and E4). Of these two teams, one was restructured in comparison to the first evaluation (Team E4). During this process, three new team members were introduced, and only five members who took part in the first cycle wanted to participate in the second cycle. Thus, it made no sense to evaluate the survey data of the second sample of Team E4 as there was very little overlap in the team members’ participation for both the samples. Further, for the second sample, a significant portion of the seven respondents returned survey data sheets that were incomplete. Therefore, the second sample of Team E4 was discarded because of low data quality. Only one team could be evaluated for a second cycle. This is the nature of action research, which is closely connected to business needs.

The evaluated team size ranged from 6 to 14 agile team members for the evaluated teams. According to Schwaber (2008), an optimally sized agile team is one that is small enough to remain light and large enough to finish the work in time. Teams with less than three team members decrease the interactions and will result in less productivity gains. In contrast, more than nine team members would require too much coordination and would generate too much complexity. Consistent with the extant literature, team effectiveness generally decreases with growing team size (Campion et al., 1993; Pearce and Sims, 2002; West, 2012). There was only one team that had 14 team members, and this was the only team that showed low shared leadership characteristics for the decision-making, vision, and teamwork attributes. This seems to be a clear indicator that the team was too large. For teams to show shared leadership, the optimal size is between four to nine team members (Schwaber, 2008).

All the teams that were investigated exhibited transformational leadership values that were in the range of the normative values; some were a bit higher, while others were a bit lower. Interestingly, the transactional leadership values of MBEA for all the teams were rather high

and above the normative values. One explanation could be that the self-organising teams moved away from a command and control team structure only about three years ago (Mikkonen et al., 2012); a change to self-organising teams takes time (Lee, 2008). Overall, it must not be treated as a negative sign that MBEA shows high values; it can well be a sign that the team members take on responsibility and use the changes to take corrective action when they see that the team goal is in danger.

The high MBEA attribute values might be why all the teams showed low shared leadership for the decision-making attribute. The extant literature states that it will take years to transform a team to a self-organising team (Jian'an, 2008). Another interesting finding was that coordination, communication, and teamwork had very good values for the shared leadership attributes. An explanation for this might be that if a person in the team cannot communicate and has low coordination as well as teamwork skills, this person will not be productive in a self-organising team. As shown for the second cycle of Team E3 (section 7.3.7), the shared leadership vision attribute dropped from sample one to sample two. For the second sample of Team E3, the IIB attribute related to charisma and vision dropped. There seems to be a connection between these two attributes of transformational and shared leadership. Both attributes deal with a vision of a team, and how this vision is translated in the team. A vision can come to life only when it is shared (Westley and Mintzberg, 1989).

The evaluation of the teams via SNA indicated that when a team shows shared leadership behaviour, there could still be people in the team who are not perceived as a leader; worse still, some team members are isolated in the team and are not recognised at all. Additionally, even though the SNA showed that the shared leadership competencies are on the shared leadership level, it is important to see this in conjunction with the density and decentralisation as well as the links per member. It could be the case that a certain shared leadership attribute is on the shared leadership level but has only a low decentralisation, which means that only a few links per member are decentralised. Therefore, the overall team behaviour would still be on a low shared leadership level after taking the social network view into consideration. Using the social network parameters of density, decentralisation, and links/member, a comprehensive view of the team dynamics can be given. Figure 39 presents a hypothetical example of the usefulness of SNA to depict team behaviour.

Shared Leadership Density 0.57 Decentralisation 0.83 Members 7 Links/Member 3.40 Shared Leadership Density 0.98 Decentralisation 0.97 Members 7 Links/Member 5.85

Figure 39: Hypothetical social network analysis

The comparison of the two hypothetical social networks indicates that both networks are in the shared leadership quadrant, and that the team shows shared leadership behaviour. Even though both networks have decentralisation over 0.8, one network has only 3.4 links/member, and the other has 5.85 links/member. There are seven team members in the team. In conclusion, this means that the team with more links per member exhibits a stronger shared leadership behaviour compared to the team with fewer links/member. Conclusions have to be drawn carefully because even if the data depicts that the team behaviour is at the shared leadership level, there can be differences in the strength and extent of shared leadership. Another example of the evaluation of shared leadership is to identify weaknesses and isolates in the network as well as people who might not be recognised by others as a leader. A good example of such an observation is based on the example of Teams E4 and E2 (Figure 40). The social network diagram shows whether there were isolated team members in the team. In the example in Figure 40, there is one person (Sam) who is completely isolated in Team E4; there is no connection at all to and from Sam in the network. Interestingly, this person was isolated for all the shared leadership attributes. The decision making attributes of Team E2 indicate that there were some members who take decisions, while at least three team members were completely isolated when it came to decision making. It seems that Helga, Silke, and Norbert did not take part in the decision-making process at all.

(a) (b)

Figure 40: Exemplary Social Network Analysis of Teams: (a) Team E4; (b) Team E2

Another interesting observation regarding the use of social network evaluation is that the network diagram makes it rather easy to observe whether there are only a few strong characters in the team, and if these are the only ones who share the leadership, as depicted for the management team (Team E5) in Figure 41 for decision making. In this example, Erik and Leif are such individuals.