Enacting the team: The role of leadership in handling in-situ membership ambiguity in hybrid meetings

Teamwork in complex organizational contexts is frequently characterized by a lack of clarity regarding which relationships are relevant at any given moment, that is, by in-situ membership ambiguity, often enacted as subgrouping. Leadership is particularly relevant in such moments, as an organizing force capable of enacting the full team as the in-situ relevant membership. Contemporary leadership theory suggests a range of discursive resources for accomplishing organizing. However, these resources all tend to be dependent on a social entity already being enacted and it is unclear how they can be useful for enacting that entity in the first place. It is thus unclear how leadership can be capable of in-situ enacting a social entity such as a team. We address this problem through an ethnomethodologically oriented study of hybrid meetings; a setting fraught with in-situ membership ambiguity. We used membership categorization analysis to explore episodes of subgrouping in 54 hybrid meetings across five different international organizations. The analysis shows that while the role of the team manager is clearly important, the enactment of the team did not depend on formal authority. Instead, leadership enacted the team through the mobilization of subtle resources made available in the evolving interaction, thus offering a novel theoretical understanding of this capacity of leadership. Our study extends theorizing on leadership organizing by challenging assumptions regarding the role of authority in the leadership process, portraying it instead as an in-situ, improvisational, and interactional art.