Meaning-Based Leadership, Intergroup Leadership, and Team Strategy Implementation

The core role of leadership in organizations is to motivate contributions toward the pursuit of organizational purpose—the reason the organization exists. This role comes into particular focus for overarching organizational initiatives, such as implementing organizational strategy. Motivating strategy implementation is notoriously challenging, however, because how to contribute to the pursuit of strategic objectives differs from team to team, and teams may struggle to see how they can contribute to such big-picture pursuits. We draw on meaning-based leadership theory to outline how meaning-based leadership (i.e., leader advocacy of the meaning that organizational purpose gives to team efforts) can stimulate the development of strategy understanding (i.e., shared understanding of how the team can contribute to efforts to put the organizational strategy into practice) and thus motivate team efforts to contribute to organizational strategy implementation. Recognizing that even when teams differ in how they can contribute to strategy implementation, their efforts are interdependent with those of other teams, we further propose that the effectiveness of meaning-based leadership in stimulating team strategy understanding is contingent on team intergroup leadership (i.e., leader advocacy of a team's interrelatedness with other teams). Thus, the indirect effect of meaning-based leadership on strategy implementation, mediated by strategy understanding, is stronger when intergroup leadership is higher (vs. lower). This model was supported in a multisource survey of 127 teams in an organization for citizenship and immigration services.