Exploring Emergent Leadership in Work Teams: An Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

The goal of this study is to look at how contextual factors influence the emergence of leaders in horizontal organizational structures. Understanding the dynamics of emergent leadership is becoming increasingly important as organizations shift from vertical to horizontal leadership styles in response to current environmental changes. Emergent leaders are individuals who have great influence inside teams but do not occupy formal leadership positions. They can appear for varied periods. This study looks primarily at the top-down, multidimensional impact of contextual factors on the bottom-up process of emerging leadership. Individual qualities, team dynamics, personality-situation interactions, and formal leadership frameworks are among the contextual factors investigated. To do this, data were gathered from forty in-depth interviews with members of nine agile teams. Thematic analysis was used to uncover and analyze themes about how these contextual elements influence the development and effectiveness of leaders inside teams. This technique provides a thorough grasp of how contextual factors shape emergent leadership in agile and non-hierarchical settings. Individual level emergent leadership processes explain open-mindedness, humility, empathy, trustworthiness, supportive as traits of emergent leaders. Emergent leader soft skills include communication, conflict resolution, time management, and multitasking. Learnability and self-awareness are most important abilities of emergent leaders. Emergent leaders are good team players. The individual level process also demonstrated how emergent leaders might maintain or lose influence over team members. According to team level processes, when team members strongly identify with their team, they support them emergent leaders. When team members' self-identification is prominent, emergent leaders are challenged. Team members who are honest, committed, active listeners, and act like team players and star followers can have a positive impact on emergent leaders. They encourage their emergent leader by acknowledging them as leaders and supporting them in accomplishing team goals through their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Team members trigger difficulties and challenges for emergent leaders when they act like black sheep, perceive their status quo as threatened and engage in communication barriers. Person-situation interactions explain why emergent leaders emerge in weak situations rather than strong situations. Emergent leaders assist team member in a variety of weak situations, including conflicting situations, risky situations, and stressful events. Person-situation interactions also explain how emergent leaders' traits help them deal with weak situations. It explores the relationship of emotional intelligence with risks and workrelated stress, extraversion with workplace stress, and conflicts, open-mindedness with interpersonal and task conflicts, trustworthiness with risk and conflicts, intellectual humility with workplace stress, and cultural intelligence with interpersonal conflicts. According to formal leader level processes, formal leaders can serve as role models for technical responsibilities, communication, stress management, and project management. They practice inclusive leadership by including the emergent leader in discussions, supporting initiatives, and showing gratitude. However, they can create a challenge to emergent leaders by adopting micromanagement, initiating conflicts and communication barriers. In presenting a new framework for emergent leadership, informed by field research with both emergent leaders and team members, this research makes a significant contribution to the emergent leadership literatures and provides guidance to organizational actors seeking to incorporate emergent leadership in teams.