Your Team Has Leaders You Haven’t Developed

We spend enormous energy selecting, training, and coaching formal leaders. We build competency models, run 360 assessments, and invest in executive education. And we largely ignore the people already leading from within the team, the ones without titles who quietly shape whether the group actually functions.

A 2024 study from KU Leuven sharpens this picture. Charlotte Edelmann and colleagues surveyed 182 employees across 31 teams in Belgian organizations, spanning healthcare to ICT. They mapped 10 distinct peer leadership roles broken into 37 specific behaviors, then measured which predicted team effectiveness, organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, and team cohesion.

Every role predicted at least two outcomes. Nearly every behavior predicted at least one. Peer leadership, when we actually measure it, is doing real work inside our organizations, whether we recognize it or not.

What the data tells us

The most consistent predictor across all four outcomes was the Motivational Leader role, the person who recognizes colleagues’ contributions, encourages others to voice opinions, and expresses genuine appreciation. That tracks with Gallup’s engagement research. Recognition is one of the lowest-cost, highest-impact leadership behaviors available, and it doesn’t require a title.

The researchers also applied Necessary Condition Analysis, a method that identifies factors that must be present for an outcome to occur at all. Motivational Leadership wasn’t just correlated with organizational citizenship behavior; it was a necessary condition for it. So were Task Leadership, Critical Innovation Leadership, and four other roles. Remove those behaviors from the team, and the outcome doesn’t just weaken. It becomes statistically unachievable.

We tend to treat peer influence as a soft variable, something nice to have alongside the “real” work of formal management. This data suggests certain peer leadership behaviors function more like load-bearing walls. Take them out, and the structure fails, regardless of how strong the formal leader is.

The counterintuitive finding

The Unity Leader — the person who emphasizes shared goals and puts team interests first — had some of the strongest individual effects on effectiveness, OCB, and cohesion. But only in teams where members didn’t already identify strongly with the team. In high-identification teams, the Unity Leader added nothing measurable.

That’s a diagnostic insight, not a universal prescription. Teams that already feel like “us” don’t need someone rallying around shared purpose. They need Task Leaders and Team-Development Leaders handling the operational coordination that a strong identity alone won’t solve. The same pattern held for team size (Unity Leadership mattered only in larger teams) and tenure (External Leadership mattered most in newer teams that hadn’t yet built cross-functional connections).

Organizations that deploy peer leadership development uniformly are wasting effort where it matters least and underinvesting where it matters most.

What this means in practice

The practical upshot starts with mapping peer leadership roles to specific team deficits rather than applying them like a uniform coat of paint. The 37 specific behaviors in this taxonomy are concrete enough to serve as development targets — things like “creating clarity about each other’s work” or “recognizing the work of colleagues,” both of which emerged as significant predictors and, in some cases, necessary conditions.

This research also reinforces what we’ve been arguing about relationship infrastructure. The Connecting Leader, External Leader, and Unity Leader roles are essentially bridger functions, the relationship-building work that determines whether information, trust, and influence actually flow across a team. Rob Cross’s organizational network research has been making this case for years. The Edelmann study adds a functional taxonomy of what those behaviors look like at the peer level.

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Formal leaders aren’t made obsolete by any of this. The practical implication is that formal leaders should identify and develop peer leaders in these specific roles rather than trying to perform all 10 functions themselves. That’s a delegation framework in a different language.

What we should be cautious about

This is a single cross-sectional study with a modest sample, conducted in Belgium during COVID-19 restrictions, with half of the interactions digital. We can’t claim causality — effective teams may produce peer leaders as easily as peer leaders produce effective teams. The moderation findings are directionally interesting but statistically fragile with only 31 teams.

Job satisfaction was the hardest outcome to move through peer leadership. Only five of the ten roles reached significance. Satisfaction is driven substantially by structural factors like compensation, autonomy, and workload, things peer leaders can’t control. Peer leadership operates within the system. It doesn’t replace the system.

We also need to think about the equity implications that the researchers didn’t explore. Who gets recognized as a peer leader? Whose influence behaviors are seen as “leadership” versus “overstepping”? If peer leadership development relies on informal identification, it risks encoding existing power dynamics rather than redistributing influence.

Making it stick

The gap between recognizing that peer leaders matter and building the capacity to develop them is the same one we see everywhere in leadership development. This research gives us a more specific map. The implementation challenge remains: translating academic behaviors into daily micro-habits that withstand real organizational pressure.

Start by identifying who is already performing these roles on our teams. Then ask the harder question: who could be, but isn’t?

Source: Edelmann, C.M., Boen, F., Stouten, J., Vande Broek, G., & Fransen, K. (2024). The power of peer leaders: Exploring the link between peer leadership behaviors and sustainable work outcomes. Behavioral Sciences, 14(1), 2.