How Team Leaders Use Salient Vision and Self-Sacrifice to Enhance Team Effectiveness

This paper sets forth a theory on how the articulation of a salient vision on the part of a team leader enhances team effectiveness in terms of innovativeness, efficacy, and performance. In addition to vision salience - determining, as it were, one dimension of successful leadership influence - this study postulates another dimension of leadership influence, i.e., self-sacrificial leader behavior. A leader's self-sacrificial behavior is shown to play a key role in communicating the credibility of her vision to the team, a critical factor on the basis of which team members may decide to commit themselves to its implementation. Drawing upon the roles of salient vision and self-sacrifice, this study hypothesizes a synergistic effect of leadership on team effectiveness when a salient vision by a team leader is conjoined with her self-sacrifice. The study also hypothesizes that a leader's self-sacrifice and salient team vision are more prominent in a collectivistic team climate, and predicts that a collectivistic team environment will be more conducive in increasing a leader's influence through vision salience and self-sacrifice than an individualistic team climate. The hypotheses were tested in a sample of teams (n=53) at the team level. The results support the positive moderating effects of vision with sacrifice, vision with collectivism, and sacrifice with collectivism, respectively, on team performance. In addition, vision salience and self-sacrifice exert their main effects on team innovativeness and team efficacy. This paper provides a detailed discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.