The document discusses the author's experience with two different team leads on a large telecom project early in their career. The first team lead took a purely task-oriented approach, provided no feedback, and created an environment of stress and ambiguity that led to counterproductive behaviors from the team. Over time, many people on the team experienced burnout. When a new team lead was brought in, they took a more people-oriented approach by setting clear roles, objectives, and feedback sessions. This instantly improved behaviors and productivity as people started going above and beyond in their work. The second team lead demonstrated a combination of neuroticism and introverted leadership that helped them gain status while maintaining team efficiency.

1. Leadership and organizational behavior
Project – Critical Reflection; A leadership crisis.
While most people can recollect a Manager that has had a significant positive influence in
their lives, the start of my career was significantly marked by a Team-Lead that taught me
exactly what sort of Manager I do not want to become.
I was a junior Java developer working on a large-scale Telecom project, at one of the largest
IT companies in the country. The project was massive and I needed significant coaching on
the technical aspects of it as well as on specific processes, however there was a lot of
ambiguity around my role and I was consistently given conflicting demands.
The entire team was constantly under several stressors such as delivery deadlines and KPIs
regarding fixing defects in the project. Feedback was also missing almost entirely, with only
the occasional bad feedback coming from emotional outbursts that I can now understand as
having a low degree of neuroticism. This, combined with the purely task-oriented nature of
the Team Lead led to ultimately a series of counter-productive work behaviors (CWBs), mostly
Production Deviance but also a lot of Political Deviance. Gradually more and more people
ended up in a burnout and, thankfully, a new Team Lead was brought in.
With the new Team Lead the turnaround was extremely visible, as he promoted people-
oriented approach to management, made sure that we all had very clear roles and
responsibilities. He also set-up clear objectives and feedback sessions that were very well
received by workers. His approach lead to instantly recognizable Organizational Citizenship
Behavior (OCBs) where people started going above and beyond – Testing of tasks started to
be done much more in depth, looking for corner-cases in the flows and workers went out of
their way to help with the onboarding of new team members.
The 2nd Team Lead proved a combination of Neuroticism and Introverted Leadership that
helped him gradually gain status and gain more power within the organization while
maintaining his teams’ efficiency.