The theoretical foundations of the research lay within two streams of literature that on study team, and that on emergent leadership. First we will review the prior studies of study teams.
2.1 Study Team
Study on study team is not new. However, the terms used for the study team are not consistent in different researches. ‘problem-solving group’ (Oh, 2012), ‘learning group’ (Yager, Johnson & Johnson, 1985) and ‘task group’ (Gladstein, 1984) emerge in literatures because of different research aims and contexts. Furthermore, most of the researches focus on the teams in organizational settings and children teams in educational context. Few study focus on the study team in higher educational context. Before we define the study …show more content…
Before we discuss emergent leadership, it is necessary to know what leadership means and what emergent leadership means
There is no consensus of definitions of term ‘leadership’ as the nature of leadership is complex (Daft, 2008). Early definitions of leadership are mainly ‘leadercentric’ and focus on leader’s one-way effects (Bass & Bass, 2009). Leader is viewed as the focus of the group process or organizational success. Recently, an increasingly popular definition of leadership is to view leadership as a process that involves both leaders and followers. The studies about leadership in working team are most from functional perspective which holds that ‘team leadership can be described as a dynamic process of social problem solving accomplished through generic responses to social problems’ (Burke et al., 2006, p289). However, Bass and Bass (2009) point out the definition of leadership should depend on ‘methodological and substantive aspects of leadership’ the researcher is interested in. In this study, difference between leader and leadership will not be highlighted as the participants in the study may mix those two concepts. However, leadership will be regarded as an interaction process between people and group in data analysis and not just focus on …show more content…
Traditional studies of leadership could be classified into three categories in general: Traits approach, Behaviour approach and Contingency approach. However, it should be noticed that those three approaches are correlated to each other to some extend despite of the different positions. Thus we cannot separate them completely when reviewing and analyzing leadership emergence. Besed on Arnoff and Wilson’s theory of sources of status and Mann’s theory of leadership emergence, Neubert and Taggar (2004) argue individual might emerge as a perceived leader in teams by means of identifiable individual differences or by fulfilling valued roles and providing valued contributions. The paper will review leadership emergence based on those two pathways: traits approach and behaviours