Event criticality, urgency, and duration: Understanding how events disrupt teams and influence team leader intervention

Research has begun to recognize the role leaders can play in enhancing semi-autonomous work team effectiveness. One recent approach suggests that leaders enhance team functioning by intervening in the context of specific events, where the effectiveness of active intervention strategies is moderated by event disruptiveness [Morgeson, F.P. (2005). The external leadership of self-managing teams: Intervening in the context of novel and disruptive events. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90 497–508.]. The present study extends this research by examining the relationship between event criticality, urgency, and duration and event disruptiveness as well as the amount of time leaders spend managing different types of events. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods in four different organizations, we found that these three characteristics of events were positively related to team disruption, but only urgency was related to the amount of time leaders spent managing the event. A qualitative analysis of the events revealed that the impact of events on team functioning and leader intervention varied according to the type of event encountered. The implications of these findings for team leadership research are discussed.