Too Much of a Good Thing or the more the Merrier?

Organizations are increasingly relying on informal leaders within teams to positively affect team outcomes. Also, as the percentage of women in the workforce grows, women are likely to shoulder more of the informal leadership responsibility within teams. This study explores the relationship of team performance and team cohesion to informal leadership dispersion and the gender composition of the informal leadership core within 21 intact manufacturing teams. The results indicate that informal leadership dispersion (the number of perceived informal leaders divided by team size) is positively related to team cohesion. In addition, when females compose a larger portion of the informal leadership core, supervisors’ratings of team performance are higher.