remaining flexible to tailor into new opportunities (similar to Business development). They argued
that these tensions could be managed when working with complementary individuals: for example,
the Chief Executive Officer and the Chief Operations Officers or two Chief Executive Officers who
complement one another (Arnone & Stumpf, 2010). In this respect, the concept of shared leadership is
especially relevant for the manifestation of strategic leadership, given that this concept is based on the
tensions between Organization-Environment focus and Exploration-Exploitation, requiring different
kinds of behavior, which may well be manifested by different individuals working in a team.
Whereas it is relatively easy to align TMT functions and organizational outcomes, this has been less
obvious at lower organizational levels. Similar to the argument made for strategic leadership to be
practiced throughout the organization (due to the changing organizational context), organizational
performance criteria which are relevant at higher organizational levels equally hold for teams
operating at lower organizational levels). In contemporary organizations, external activities or
boundary-spanning activities are becoming more and more important for teams across all
organizational levels. Organizational teams cannot rely solely on either internal or external activities
because no team works in a vacuum of external forces and, at the same time, no team exists without
maintaining its boundary. Given that a team has only limited resources (e.g. time, effort, and
personnel), conducting either internal or external activities may reduce resources available for the
other. This trade-off relationship forces organizational teams to allocate their resources between
internal and external activities. This trade-off between internal and external activities appears to be the
critical issue of managing team boundaries, as noted by Sundstrom et al. (1990)³7KHJURXSERXQGDU\
needs continual management to ensure that it becomes neither too sharply delineated nor too
SHUPHDEOHVRWKDWWKHWHDPQHLWKHUEHFRPHVLVRODWHGQRUORVHVLWVLGHQWLW\ ́(p.130). Teams that strike
a good balance or shift emphasis between internal and external activities seem to be more effective in
general than teams that stick to either one of the two activities (Ancona & Caldwell, 1988; Cohen &
Levinthal, 1990; Gersick, 1988).
Multiple team outcome measures exist (Mathieu et al., 2008), yet for the purpose of this study, team
effectiveness measures were included which were drawn from and validated in previous studies. As
the strategic model is based on seemingly contradictory organizational objectives, the team
effectiveness measures needed to be in line with these different organizational objectives. No study
has yet included the four objectives of strategic leadership in one model, hence four separate team
effectiveness measures were included: i.e. Team innovation as an outcome of Organizational
creativity, Team efficiency as an outcome of Operational efficiency, Market responsive orientation as