Second, empowering leadership has been studied mainly with respect to individual employees or non managerial teams. Our second purpose in this research was to expand the domain of empowering leadership research to management
teams. As Cohen and Bailey wrote, “the management team is responsible for the overall performance of a business unit”. Despite the importance of management teams to organizational performance, leadership, team processes, and emergent states have not been examined in as much detail in management teams as in other types of teams. Yet such investigations are critical because, unlike non managerial teams, in which the focus is on a set of team
tasks, management teams are effective only insofar as they are able to effect a high level of performance
by a significant business unit or an entire firm. Thus, it is not clear which team processes and states “scale up” to facilitating major business unit outcomes. Moreover, the findings from research on other kinds of teams may not necessarily generalize to management team