Once cross-functional team members have the opportunity to excel at tasks that take advantage of their core strengths, ownership of the team's mission, goals and tasks is more apparent than in more transactionally-based leadership environments. This concept of ownership is well highlighted in the many research efforts of Alstyne, Brynjolfsson and Madnick from MIT who in several research papers and results report the importance of fostering and promoting ownership of tasks through transformational leadership. In their study of the correlation of task and team ownership with business process change success, Alstyne, Brynjolfsson and Madnick (1997) comment that "The very act of decentralizing decision-making - asking workers for their values and then taking them seriously - can have a positive effect on the change process by giving employees a sense of ownership and responsibility," and from previous work show the impact of theories of ownership on change management with this insight from their work Alstyne, Brynjolfsson and Madnick (1995): "Theories of ownership, for example, suggest that decentralizing the use of data and decisions can boost quality levels in systems users control themselves."

Where EI, transformational leadership, and the effectiveness of a cross-functional team get tested is in the execution of the strategic it Plan. CIOs with high EI begin the cross-functional team creation process by specifically studying the team-to-division hand-off even before the cross-functional team begins work. The many challenges of turning a strategic plan into a series of more tactical strategies within a company require the CIO to continually focus on the transformational leadership qualities that lead to the development of the plan to begin with.

This is particularly...

In fact research shows that transactional leadership is also ideal for those tasks that require a quick execution to get results, and "ownership" of tasks is not necessarily required, just execution (Antonakis & House, 2002). Yet the CIO needs to walk a delicate balance between becoming too transactional, too focused on immediate results when the strategic it plan needs an entirely different mindset. For the CIO, their time horizons often fluctuate between the immediate and years from now, making the shift from one leadership style another challenging.
Summary

Implementing a successful strategic it plan has more to do with the ability of the CIO to create successfully functioning cross-functional teams, the ability to use effective transformational leadership strategies, and most of all, infuse a sense of ownership into the plan across departments.

References

Alstyne, Marshall van, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Stuart Madnick (1997). "The Matrix of Change: A Tool for Business Process Reengineering." MIT Sloan School Working Papers available on the Internet, accessed on March 29, 2007:

http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP189/ccswp189.html

Alstyne, Marshall van, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Stuart Madnick (1995). "Why Not One Big Database? Principles for Data Ownership." Decision Support Systems 15.4 (1995): 267-284.

Antonakis, J., & House, R.J. (2002). The full-range leadership theory: The way forward. In B.J. Avolio & F.J. Yammarino (Eds.) Transformational and Charismatic Leadership, Volume 2, p. 3-33. Boston: JAI Press.