Aim:
This paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of shared leadership by identifying which leadership responsibilities can be shared, and exploring how leadership can be enacted by multiple individuals in a group setting.
Background and Rationale:
Recent years have seen a growing interest in alternative approaches to leadership, with shared leadership in particular advocated as a way to enable organisations to operate effectively in complex and dynamic business environments (Yammarino et al., 2012). Dramatic events such as Brexit demonstrate the challenges modern organisations face, operating in an uncertain business environment where many important factors are often unknown. These conditions present a sizeable challenge for organisational leadership, raising questions about whether individual business leaders have the skills to successfully navigate such a complex landscape (Nahavandi, 2012).
To deal with such challenges, organisations are increasingly embracing shared approaches to leadership (Pearce and Manz, 2005; Hoch, 2013). Shared leadership is defined by Conger and Pearce (2003: 1) as ‘a dynamic interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both’. This implies a sharing of leadership responsibilities, ‘so that the person in charge at any moment, is the one with the key knowledge, skills and ability for the aspect of the job at hand’ (Schedlitzki and Edwards, 2014: 153). Hoch and Dulebohn (2017: 4) describe this as ‘the spreading of leadership to multiple or all team members...’ Leadership in this form has been described as numerous, transient, fluid, migratory, ambiguous and distributed (Buchanan et al., 2007), representing a significant departure from traditional vertical approaches, where leadership is seen as the remit of formally appointed managers.
Although empirical research on shared leadership has grown significantly in recent years, much of this research is comprised of quantitative studies (Serban and Roberts, 2016), focusing on the impact of shared leadership on team performance (Ulhoi and Muller, 2014). While these studies largely support the view that shared leadership can contribute significantly to team performance (e.g. Avolio et al., 1996; Pearce and Ensley, 2001; Carson et al., 2007), there have been few insights into what is actually shared or how. Accordingly, our understanding of how multiple individuals enact leadership is still lacking (Dust and Ziegert, 2012). In short, shared leadership implies a role for multiple group members in the leadership of their group but research to date has not explained how this happens (Seibert et al., 2003).
Methodology and Contributions
This working paper provides a preliminary analysis of findings from a longitudinal multiple case study, exploring incidents of shared leadership in four organisational teams. Employing a qualitative approach comprised of semi-structured interviews and participant diaries, the study provides a unique insight into occurrences of shared leadership as experienced by individuals in organisational teams. The paper contributes to theory in the field by identifying which leadership responsibilities can be shared, and how leadership can be enacted by multiple individuals in a group setting.
Paper type: Working paper
