Team temporal leadership, the practice of managing pacing, deadlines and scheduling within a team, was found to increase leaders’ emotional exhaustion while reducing exhaustion among followers. Two multiwave, multisource field studies examined how this form of leadership shaped resource dynamics affecting task performance for both leaders and the people they led. Higher team task complexity strengthened the benefits for followers, improving their mental effort and process clarity, and also strengthened leaders’ process clarity, with knock-on effects for their exhaustion and performance. Task complexity did not change the effect of this leadership style on leaders’ mental effort.
The findings were published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior on 26 August 2026, in a study describing team temporal leadership as a resource investment that benefits followers at a cost to the leader providing it.
Source: Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2026-08-26.