What team leaders think: exploring mental representations of leadership and teams

Purpose Organizations increasingly call for teamwork when working on challenges such as implementing new technologies or creating innovations. Teams require team leaders who analyze the situations at hand. This study explores team leaders’ mental representations of such situations and their decisions on how to act. Design/methodology/approach To study such team leaders’ cognitions, four types of mental representations were explored – team leaders’ mental representations of team leadership, self-view as team leaders, understanding of teams and team tasks and team leadership behavior repertoires – and any alignment between these mental representations was analyzed. Various elicitation techniques were used in interviews with 15 team leaders. Findings The analysis showed that team leaders thought differently about leadership and teams and did not necessarily present a collective leadership perspective or a broad view of teams. Furthermore, those with more varied mental representations of leadership and situations in teams mentioned a greater variety of leadership behaviors in their repertoires that they would apply in different situations. Originality/value The inclusion of these cognitive properties in “team” leadership advances leader cognition research, which predominantly takes a leader–follower perspective and contributes to research that strongly focuses on the mental representations of team members. Combinations of methods were used (e.g. survey data and vignette-driven interviews), adding empirical depth and representing methodological rigor and novelty. This study reveals the diversity and particularity of team leader cognitions and their alignment, showing the importance of a cognitive approach to complement team leadership based on behavioral research traditions.