The effect of team leaders behavior in organizations

Today I decided to write my blog post about my own topic. Especially I want to talk about the behavior of managers and team leader in an organization. Moreover, I want to discuss about behavior of employees in teams. This are all topics we will discuss in our course, so I decided to choose this theme for my blog post.

Firstly, I want to share my experience with the organization especially the behavior of managers and leaders. I worked at an insurance group in Vienna where the team leader of the company negatively affected the employees. This was one of the reasons why I chose my major HR management and change management. I wanted to work in HR to change organizations in a positive way. I talked with the manager about the situation in the company and canceled my working contract before my exchange semester. For that reason, it was easier for me to interview my colleagues for my Bachelor thesis.

In my thesis I explained the situation in the company. It is a very big insurance company in Austria and an international company, who decided to establish a subsidiary company. For that company, they searched very quickly for  team leaders and one of the new team leaders was mine.

My team leader had no experience with leadership before and was an employee at the same level as the others. After employing her as a team leader the situation got difficult. One aspect was that the situation changed very fast. The day before the employees were in the same hierarchy level and the day after she was their team leader. The situation was difficult for everybody because they didn’t know how to behave and the team leader had difficulties managing her personal connection to the team members. Moreover, it was difficult for her be professional.

Months after the situation was not getting better. A few employees already gave notice because they couldn’t handle the situation. The team leader was acting in a very unprofessional way and was disrespectful towards her team. A lot of employees were in this company long before but the new team leader gave them the feeling that they were not good employees. Furthermore, the team leader was overstrained and she knew exactly how to hurt her team members. The team leader also had difficulties structuring the work of her employees. Sometimes they had nothing to do and the other times they had to stay at work during the weekends.

Before I left the company, the problems were getting bigger and bigger. The team could not handle the work because most of the people gave notice and after one year only five people of the original team worked there.

I talked about the situation with HR and they recommended me to search for another job because the situation would not get better with that leader. They tried to talk with her a lot of times but it was not possible to change something.

I also had interviews with my colleagues. In the department, all team members thought it was a very bad environment. They didn’t feel good because they had the feeling the work was not good enough and never heard a thank you. The employees had to do a lot of extra work because a lot of colleagues gave notice but they never got a recognition. They were also thinking about searching for another job soon.

I also talked with my colleagues about improvement in the team. They thought it would be better when their team leader takes part in leadership seminars to learn how to act with employees. And I also think nobody is a born leader you have to learn a lot to get very good in this field.  

I don’t know how the current situation is in the team but it was my way to find my major because I want to make it different and I would be very happy to work in the future in the HR department of a company.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 21, 2019

    You are the first person this semester to write on other than the prompt. As the prompt next week will overlap with some of your ideas here, I will encourage you to extend this example to your post next week.

    Let me take a little issue on your use of language before commenting on the other ideas in your post. You used the word "leader" where I think it better to use the word "manager." Sometimes the two are used interchangeably, but (a) as you suggest some managers may not show leadership at all and (b) sometimes leadership happens by people who are subordinate to the manager. There's a term for that. It's called leadership in place. I believe in that. So my view is that many people should get leadership training, even if they will not soon be promoted to a manager position.

    On the subject matter, I think your post could be improved by describing the situation before the person became a manager. This includes whether the person was very friendly with the others in the group or more isolated. It also includes technical competence of the person as compared to others in the group. And it includes how the previous manager behaved. Were the expectations of everyone else in the group driven by that?

    Sometimes very technically competent people get promoted to managerial positions as a reward for how they performed in the previous position . But their prior competence doesn't translate to the new job. This is an an example of The Peter Principle. It is not quite the same thing, but in my field ed tech, many of the innovative faculty in the 1990s ended up becoming administrators. That was their reward.

    A different reason for promotion, and I'm unclear whether that was relevant in your case, is that the prior manager left and the company wanted to fill the whole quickly rather than do an extensive search. The search tends to validate the person who takes the position. It's harder if the change happens without a search. But searches can take a while an be cumbersome. So the urgency in filling the position can begat the type of problems you discuss in your essay.

    There's one further issue with the new manager coming from within the group. If the members of the group had a vote on it (they usually don't have any say in the matter) would they have voted for that person or not. Sometimes it's ambiguous how this would turn out. The person who became the manager, sensing this, asserts authority. Again, this is not quite the same thing, but when I was a brand new Assistant Professor here I taught an undergraduate class where the students were only a few years younger than I was. I ended up teaching a course that was way over their heads. I "proved" I deserved to be an assistant professor by doing that, but most of the students thought it was a horrible course. So I think the psychology in these situations would tend to produce the outcomes you describe.

    Could this have been prevented? You mention training on leadership. I think that's part of it. But I would also favor formal searches as another part. And then there has to be monitoring by the manager's manager, to make adjustments and interventions, if necessary.

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  2. Julia Kaltenböck Econ 490 Fall 2019October 06, 2019

    The team leader was before very familiar with the others and they knew a lot of each other. The other group members that she should act very professional but the problem was that she has not leading experience. The main problem of here was to find the gap between being a team leader and friends with their colleagues at the same time. Furthermore, she had to have knowledge about everybody’s job and how it works. After a time of working as a leader she got most of the knowledge but there were also fields that were too complex for here.

    I think that could be prevented with training or leadership. Another possibility would be to get a smaller leadership position in the beginning to learn and to improve herself.

    She had an outside help and had two coaches. They helped here with the technical issues but also with leadership.

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