Mind the gap: The role of leadership in multiteam system collective cognition Toshio Murase a , Dorothy R. Carter a, ⁎, Leslie A. DeChurch a , Michelle A. Marks b a Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA b George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA article info abstract Article history: Received 19 July 2013 Received in revised form 24 May 2014 Accepted 18 June 2014 Available online xxxx Handling Editor: Shelly Dionne The increasing prevalence of team-based organizations places a premium on leadership that will “mind the gap” and enable smooth synchronization of activities across multiple distinct teams. Prior work shows that leaders can be trained to directly facilitate between-team coordination processes. Yet, relatively little is known about the intervening psychological mechanisms that enable between-team coordination. Here, we advance multiteam-interaction mental models— cognitive structures containing knowledge of appropriate between-team activities—as one mechanism that facilitates coordination among multiple teams. We use leader and team cognition data gathered in DeChurch and Marks' (2006) MTS study to test these ideas. Results reveal leaders' multiteam-interaction mental model accuracy “transfers” to teams through strategic communica- tion, and leader strategic communication enables between-team coordination by promoting accuracy in followers' mental models. This study highlights the importance of leadership for developing collective cognition that allows teams to “scale up” from small stand-alone teams to larger and more complex systems. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Multiteam systems Leader strategic communication Multiteam-interaction mental models Introduction Scholars have long emphasized leadership as a particularly potent force for organizing and coordinating collectives. However, the challenges associated with leading multiple teams, groups, or organizations, have not been adequately addressed by traditional leader- ship research (Hogg, van Kippenberg, & Rast, 2012). Typically, leadership is studied in contexts where leaders and followers all share a common group membership. Yet, in real world contexts, leaders are often responsible for influencing the coordinated activities of mul- tiple groups or teams (Pittinsky & Simon, 2007). For example, as work is increasingly structured into teams, specialized teams are often called upon to work interdependently with other specialized teams to tackle complex problems requiring disparate skills and expertise (e.g., DeChurch & Zaccaro, 2010; Lanaj, Hollenbeck, Ilgen, Barnes, & Harmon, 2013). Hybrid organizational forms in which two or more teams work interdependently toward one or more shared goals are termed multiteam systems (i.e., MTSs; Mathieu, Marks, & Zaccaro, 2001), and a small, but growing set of findings demonstrate that between-team processes are critical drivers of their success (Davison, Hollenbeck, Barnes, Sleesman, & Ilgen, 2012; DeChurch & Marks, 2006; Marks, DeChurch, Mathieu, Panzer, & Alonso, 2005). Unfortunately, effective collaboration among multiple teams is not a given. Groups or teams that should be working together may instead compete for scarce resources (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1977) or emphasize individual or team objectives above superordinate goals (Marks et al., 2005). In organizations, these breakdowns can lead to great losses in revenue; at a more macro scale, these breakdowns can be catastrophic—for example, when the FBI and CIA failed to coordinate knowledge sharing prior to September 11, 2001 (Caruso, The Leadership Quarterly xxx (2014) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: toshio.murase@gmail.com (T. Murase), dorothyrpc@gmail.com (D.R. Carter), lesliedechurch@gmail.com (L.A. DeChurch), mmarks@gmu.edu (M.A. Marks). LEAQUA-00989; No of Pages 15 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.06.003 1048-9843/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect The Leadership Quarterly journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/leaqua Please cite this article as: Murase, T., et al., Mind the gap: The role of leadership in multiteam system collective cognition, The Lead- ership Quarterly (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.06.003