Steadying the fickle friend—How leader extraversion and neuroticism shape teams’ ability to build on prior success for sustained performance

The present study elaborates how team leader extraversion and neuroticism contribute to explaining whether and to what extent teams learn and thus benefit from prior success in their future performance. To develop our theoretical arguments, we integrate ideas from the team learning and leadership literatures. We test our hypotheses based on regression analyses utilizing spline functions. Our dataset comprises information from 72 teams that provide financial services at a bank, which were obtained from multiple data sources and via a sequential research design. Our analyses provide evidence supporting the idea that by influencing team learning, team leader extraversion and neuroticism serve as important contingencies of how prior team success relates to future team performance. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and research and derive practical implications for the selection and development of leaders.