[jt2190]

Anecdote: I've been on more that one team where no leadership emerged, and in fact, leadership type behavior was passively resisted. The reasons for this were many, but essentially it was easier (and I suspect more fun) when individual contributors could do their own thing in their own way, without any concern for the impact on their team members or downstream consumers of the software (help desk, IT, etc.) After all, writing useful log messages, or following a coding convention, or writing an automated test are all tedious and not very interesting compared to coding. These teams (if they can be called that) produced software that had little to no overall design.