This study concerned team behaviors that are directed outward, toward other parts of the organization, using an "external" perspective. Although social psychologists have devoted substantial attention to the fine-grained analysis of behavior within groups, it is only recent that the external perspective is studied in depth. A variety of studies have demonstrated the importance of external activities affecting other parts in the organization to group or organizational outcome, but there has not been a systematic effort to identify the full set of specific activities in which teams engage. Thus, the first task in building the external perspective was to describe what teams actually do across their boundaries.
In general, team leader plays an important role in team's the external activity. So, this study developed a framework for describing and studying the team leaders' external activity in organization that draws on the theoretical perspective to treat external activity as upward influence. This study focused on the upward influence of project team leaders adopted to manage their organizational environment outside their teams. In the literature, only a few studies of influence decision-making have been conducted in specialized organizational settings such as this area. Also, although individual influence methods have been studied, few researchers have investigated how tactics are combined into influence strategies.
An influence strategies framework is used to represent innovation as a socio-political process of contested change. Using self-report data from a sample of 87 project teams at public and private research institutes, this study extended previous research examining relative effect of the project team leader's external activities on team performance. This study also examined antecedents of the project team leader's influences tactics. Relationships between individual/ organizational antecedents, and influence strategies were empirically investigated.
Project team leaders appear to develop distinct influence strategies toward their superiors: some specialize in particular influence tactics, some remain isolated from the influence attempts, and others engage multiple influence tactics. This study shows that the type of influence strategy of the project team leader determines team's performance.
Project team leaders' influence methods varied depending upon the target and organization characteristics of influence context. Also, the influence tactics' relative effectiveness varied depending upon the target and organization characteristics of influence context. These findings support the contextual perspective that the characteristics of influence context make a significant variation in influence attempts and its effectiveness.
