Leadership Thinking of the Early Twentieth Century Related to Shared Leadership

While several of the most influential authors of the early twentieth century (e.g., Gantt, Reference Gantt1916; Gilbreth, Reference Gilbreth1912; Gilbreth & Gilbreth, Reference Gilbreth and Gilbreth1917; Taylor, Reference Taylor1903, Reference Taylor1911), proponents of scientific management, advocated for and clearly articulated top-down model of leadership, there were pockets of early shared leadership discourse, even if it was not labeled as such. For instance, Mary Parker Follett, a community activist and management consultant, advocated a concept called the law of the situation (Follett, Reference Follett1924). The essence of the law of the situation was that, instead of simply following the dictates of someone in a hierarchical position, people should take direction from the person with the most knowledge about the situation at hand, and that this would vary from situation to situation. At the time of publication, this was a novel idea and was in sharp contrast to the prevailing wisdom of the day when it came to leadership. Her perspective is clearly a forerunner of shared leadership theory.

Even though Follett was popular as both a management consultant and as a speaker in the 1920s, her thinking was largely discounted by the majority of the mainstream business community. One might speculate that the economic uncertainties of the time may have had a role in that regard. For instance, the world was filled with uncertainty with respect to the classic external organizational factors (i.e., political, economic, sociocultural, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE) (Aguilar, Reference Aguilar1967), especially during the late 1920s through the mid 1940s, and this may have caused business leaders to loathe the notion of giving up control to others that was inherent in Parker’s writings. With that said, Peter Drucker called her “the brightest star in the management firmament” in her era (Drucker, Reference Drucker1995, p. 2).

Regardless of the global systemic upheaval, in the 1930s, the human relations school (e.g., Bernard, Reference Bernard1938; Mayo, Reference Mayo1933) and social systems perspective (Turner, Reference Turner1933) also both articulated the importance to paying attention to workers and that their psychological needs were imbedded in the social systems of economic activity. As such, these early writers foreshadowed the concept of shared leadership.

Mid Twentieth-Century Developments Related to Shared Leadership

As we move forward to the 1940s and 1950s, we note additional perspectives adding foundational work for the ultimate development of shared leadership theory. For example, Benne and Sheats (Reference Benne and Sheats1948) described the notion of role differentiation in groups, where various members would have a role for influencing group achievement due to their experience and topical knowledge, as just two examples. Solomon, Loeffler, and Frank (Reference Solomon, Loeffler and Frank1953) described the idea of “co-leadership” in mentor-protégé relationships in psychological counseling. They found that even if the therapeutic team were different in seniority in title, neither co-leader would be placed in a differing level of authority or dominance, while in the therapeutic group meeting setting and, in fact, they would behave as supportive partners who shared responsibility for a common goal.

Further, two theories elaborated on key social interactions: social comparison theory was articulated by Festinger (Reference Festinger1953), where group members include ability evaluation in their assessment of others, and secondly, where the stability of that evaluative process is predicated on the similarities or divergences from the others’ abilities, often compared to their own as ‘prototypes’, and social exchange theory as explained by Homans (Reference Homans1958) as the interaction that occurs when influence is gained from others by the act of accepting the other’s influence in return. Finally, Drucker (Reference Drucker1954) forwarded the concept of management by objectives, which described both the allowance and innate desirability for individuality in goal setting but also highlights how those individual goals exist in an interdependent organizational system – reinforcing the notion that organizations are essentially systemic communities of interdisciplinary actors reliant upon one another for success, rather than independent cogs or constituents. Each of these ideas from the 1940s and 1950s added additional intellectual components for the construction of shared leadership theory.

Building on this previous work, scholars in the 1960s provided additional insights closely aligned with shared leadership theory. For instance, Hollander (Reference Hollander1961) observed and wrote about the idea of leader emergence from leaderless groups, while Bowers and Seashore (Reference Bowers and Seashore1966) observed what they called mutual leadership, where the support for a group’s needs could be offered by the formal leader or members for each other, or both. These two concepts are core intellectual contributions to the ultimate development of shared leadership theory.

Late Twentieth-Century Thinking Related to Shared Leadership

In the 1970s we witnessed an accelerated pace of scientific discoveries related to shared leadership. For instance, Berger, Cohen and Zelditch (Reference Berger, Cohen and Zelditch1972) postulated expectation states theory, that is, how individual expectation-states are formed and determine interactive behavior between members of a group. Group members form different evaluations of status, expectations of status, and, overall, generally different expectations based on the assessment of status characteristics. Vroom and Yetton (Reference Vroom and Yetton1973) articulated the idea of participative decision making, and Graen (Reference Graen and Dunnette1976) described the concept of vertical dyad linkage, which built on previous ideas about social exchange mechanisms. A bit later in the decade, Kerr and Jermier (Reference Kerr and Jermier1978) forwarded the notion of substitutes for leadership and Liden and Graen (Reference Liden and Graen1979) articulated the importance of leader-member exchange – that is, leaders will form relationships that differ with each of their followers/subordinates based on various factors, including leadership styles and subordinate roles. All of these concepts provide additional explicative foundations for shared leadership theory.

In the 1980s and 1990s we witnessed several additional developments regarding concepts related to shared leadership. For instance, Manz and Sims (Reference Manz and Sims1980) forwarded the notion of self-management, where group members managed their own behaviors by self-administering consequences for their performance, which Manz subsequently developed into the concept of self-leadership (Manz, Reference Manz1986). Self-leadership expanded the previous work on self-management in that it explored the role of intentional self-influence (self-leading) on personal growth, motivation, and performance. Relatedly, Erez and Arad (Reference Erez and Arad1986) described the process of participative goal setting, where they found that cognitive, social, and motivational participation factors were useful in facilitating positive group and organizational outcomes. Finally, Manz and Sims (Reference Manz and Sims1987) investigated self-managing work teams and the seemingly paradoxical nature of a leader’s role in such a team, and the behaviors that are useful to cultivate in facilitating a team where the leader becomes nominally superfluous yet still present.

Following in these footsteps, Kelly (Reference Kelly1988) articulated the concept of followership, mainly in answer to the almost universal focus on the leader. He noted that if followers were considered, it was usually still simply to bring more clarity to the role of “leader,” yet to exclude them as a discrete component of the relationship was to paint an incomplete picture of both, as neither exists without each other. Conger and Kanungo (Reference Conger and Kanungo1988) forwarded a model of the empowerment process that integrated the diverse viewpoints of the field from both the management and psychology literatures and Seers (Reference Seers1989) provided a perspective on team member exchange relationships that provided a complementary clarity of the role that quality team member exchange relationships played intra-team, thus rounding out the network relationships that were initially explored in the earlier leader-member exchange research.

Finally, the idea of shared cognition, also known as shared mental models, as illuminated by Cannon-Bowers, Salas and Converse (Reference Cannon-Bowers, Salas, Converse and Castellan1993) as well as Klimoski and Mohammed (Reference Klimoski and Mohammed1994) are useful in understanding more of how teams make decisions, particularly with respect to how consequences are defined in the context of the team. Klimoski and Mohammed (Reference Klimoski and Mohammed1994) note that while Durkheim (Reference Durkheim1895/1938) also made mention of the idea “group mind,” it was more to imply a general sense of unified collectiveness. However, the early interest in understanding this notion of individual group member’s various expectations, thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions as a summative group-level phenomenon had fallen away until the later twentieth century when there was again critical interest in more purposeful exploration of the value not just in the top-down leader’s vision-making process, but the notion of shared thought as organizationally beneficial. Slightly later, Heenan and Bennis (Reference Heenan and Bennis1999) described an alternative type of co-leadership that involved truly equal role sharing between two leaders, what they called vertically contiguous leaders who shared the leadership responsibilities of their respective positions. They elaborated further by highlighting that the truly “shrewd leaders of the future are those who recognize the significance of creating alliances with others whose fates are correlated with their own” (Heenan & Bennis, Reference Heenan and Bennis1999: viii).

Summary of Twentieth-Century Intellectual Foundations of Shared Leadership

We have very briefly discussed some of the most important historical underpinnings to the development of shared leadership theory – from the Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain, but which quickly spread to the rest of the globe, to the pioneers in the area of scientific management, to several interesting and valuable streams of research that allow us more clarity for understanding the development of shared leadership theory.

While two of these earlier publications (Follett, Reference Follett1924; Bowers & Seashore, Reference Bowers and Seashore1966) might best be described as one-hit-wonders, which were squarely in line with shared leadership, they quickly faded from the scientific discourse. Clearly, the scientific community did not embrace these ideas at the time but they, nonetheless, provided important intellectual stakes in the ground for our current understanding of shared leadership theory. What is clear is that each of these scientific traditions provide intellectual ingredients for the galvanization of shared leadership theory, and again, reinforce that shared leadership theory exists in a meta theoretical plateau, in that it is woven from both supportive and contextual social experiences that when drawn together create an environment where shared leadership can exist.

It is always important to look back in time, to understand how we have arrived at our current location. The historical backdrop of shared leadership theory is rich and complex and up until quite recently, fragmented within other human social experience without much theoretical clarity. With that said, it is now uniformly understood that shared leadership is a critical frame through which to conceptualize leadership dynamics. To wit, in Section 1 we provided an overview graph documenting the rising interest in shared leadership, particularly from the early 2000s. From humble beginnings in the 1990s (Pearce, Reference Pearce1993, Reference Pearce1995, Reference Pearce1997) and two key publications (Pearce & Sims, Reference Pearce and Sims2002; Pearce & Conger, Reference Pearce and Conger2003) in the early 2000s, we now witness an exponential growth in the number of publications on shared leadership, both empirical and conceptual in nature, across many disciplines (e.g., organizational psychology, management and sociology, political science, etc.) and industry sectors (e.g., healthcare, education, public administration, engineering, construction, etc.). Since 2000, at least 1,225 research-focused publications have appeared on shared leadership, with many more in the popular literature, and the number and type of work in this area is not only accelerating in actual numbers but also in the sophistication of analysis. In the next two sections, we delve much more deeply into the research findings surrounding shared leadership.

Vertical Leadership

Much of the theoretical writing about antecedents of shared leadership has focused on the role of vertical leadership. This seems quite logical for two reasons: first, because the traditional focus in leadership research has been on the formal leaders, but second, and more importantly, the formal leader would appear to be critical component of shared leadership emergence in a group or team. As such, it is not surprising that a great deal of the empirical work on antecedents of shared leadership has focused on this issue. For example, (Hoch, Reference Hoch2013; Hess, Reference Hess2015) found vertical leader support (e.g., commitment to the team, continuous reinforcement of involvement and of team autonomy, and commitment to enabling resources) to be linked to shared leadership development. Moreover, George, Burke, Rodgers, Duthie, Hoffmann, Koceja et al. (Reference George, Burke and Rodgers2002), Klasmeier and Rowold (Reference Klasmeier and Rowold2020), and Olson-Sanders (Reference Olson-Sanders2006) identified trust in the vertical leader to be directly associated with shared leadership development.

More recently, in the context of police work, Masal (Reference Masal2015) found transformational leadership from above to be a predictor of shared leadership. Transformational leadership has been evaluated by others as well (e.g., Hoch, Reference Hoch2013; Klasmeier & Rowold, Reference Klasmeier and Rowold2020; Tung & Shih, Reference Tung and Shih2023; Von Stieglitz, Reference Von Stieglitz2023), with similar results.

Shamir and Lapidot (Reference Shamir, Lapidot, Pearce and Conger2003), in a study of the Israeli Defense Forces, concluded that goal alignment between leaders and followers, as well as follower trust in and satisfaction with vertical leaders, was associated with the development of shared leadership. Abson and Schofield (Reference Abson and Schofield2022) found that a leader’s transparency, and the development of a shared vision, was also integral for shared leadership to emerge in teams where knowledge work and high pressure was also present. This same research team, and others, have found that leaders who engage in empowering leadership behaviors will have followers who report more shared leadership (e.g., Carson, et al., Reference Carson, Tesluk and Marrone2007; Fausing, Joensson, Lewandowski, & Bligh, Reference Fausing, Joensson, Lewandowski and Bligh2015, Grille, Schulte, and Kauffeld, Reference Grille, Schulte and Kauffeld2015; Hoch, Reference Hoch2013; Lyndon, & Pandey, Reference Lyndon and Pandey2020; Margolis & Ziegert, Reference Margolis and Ziegert2016; Svensson, Jones, & Kang, Reference Svensson, Jones and Kang2021; Wassenaar, Reference Wassenaar2017).

In a similar vein, Elloy (Reference Elloy2008) concluded vertical leader engagement with team members in decision-making facilitates the development of shared leadership, while more recently, several studies (e.g., Chiu, Reference Chiu2014; Chiu, Owens, & Tesluk, Reference Chiu, Owens and Tesluk2016; Svensson, et al., Reference Svensson, Jones and Kang2021) found that the humility demonstrated by the vertical leader to be a precursor of shared leadership, where humility promoted both leadership-claiming as well as leadership-granting behaviors from team members. Wang, Jiang, Liu, and Ma, (Reference Wang, Jiang, Liu and Ma2017) and Svensson, et al., (Reference Svensson, Jones and Kang2021) also found that servant leadership behaviors demonstrated by the leader led to more shared leadership in the sports teams that were the target respondents in their study, especially in development environments – that is, environments where the amount of resources are scant.

Hooker and Csikszentmihalyi (Reference Hooker, Csikszentmihalyi, Pearce and Conger2003), in a qualitative study of research and development laboratories, found six vertical leader behaviors to provide the conditions for the development of shared leadership: (1) valuing excellence, (2) providing clear goals, (3) giving timely feedback, (4) matching challenges and skills, (5) diminishing distractions, and (6) creating freedom. Echoing some of these findings, Wood (Reference Wood2005) and Margolis and Ziegert (Reference Margolis and Ziegert2016) found that leaders who enabled more group safety through lower levels of abusive supervision enable groups to experience more shared leadership. Similarly, in a series of qualitative studies, Pearce et al. (Reference Pearce, Manz and Sims2014) found vertical leader engagement in empowering behavior, visionary behavior, as well as providing a focus on values to be associated with the development of shared leadership. Wassenaar (Reference Wassenaar2017) found that a leader’s diversity orientation and the perception of their fairness toward members of the team also resulted in higher levels of shared leadership.

While not directly associated with the formal leader of the team, Carson et al. (Reference Carson, Tesluk and Marrone2007) noted that supportive coaching from external leaders – leaders who are not in any sort of supervisorial role of the team members – was useful in developing more shared leadership. Grille et al. (Reference Grille, Schulte and Kauffeld2015) note that team member’s perception of how fairly they are rewarded by the leader, is also associated with shared leadership. Finally, in a study of several major Finnish healthcare organizations, Konu and Viitanen (Reference Konu and Viitanen2008) found that female vertical leaders are more likely to develop shared leadership than their male counterparts. In sum, these aforementioned studies identify a critical role of vertical leadership in the shared leadership equation.

Organizational Support Systems and Structures

A second major category of antecedents that have been linked to shared leadership are those that focus on support structures and systems within organizations. For example, information technology systems that facilitate collaboration continues to evolve in sophistication and scope, and where well used in organizations to develop communication and information exchange mechanisms for group work, has also been identified as a facilitator of shared leadership. To support this notion, Wassenaar, Pearce, Hoch, and Wegge (Reference Wassenaar, Pearce, Hoch, Wegge and Yoong2010) found information technology support systems, in a qualitative study of German virtual teams, to facilitate the development of shared leadership. Similarly, Cordery, Soo, Kirkman, Rosen, and Mathieu (Reference Cordery, Soo, Kirkman, Rosen and Mathieu2009), in a study of parallel virtual global teams, found technological support structures, which focused on enabling team members to communicate more easily, and which facilitated the transfer of learning across team members, generated greater development of shared leadership across such teams.

Beyond technology, Pearce et al. (Reference Pearce, Manz and Sims2014), in a compilation of qualitative studies, found that three key internal systems: selection; compensation; and education, training, and development systems were integral in providing a platform that enabled a shared leadership environment to evolve. The support of the organization for creating shared events, such as professional development opportunities or town hall meetings, as just two examples, are also useful platforms (Kang & Svensson, Reference Kang and Svensson2023). In that same study, Kang and Svensson (Reference Kang and Svensson2023) also evaluated how strategic planning, in this case conceptualized as the strategic decision to distribute various leader functions collaboratively, resulted in reports of more shared leadership. Similarly, Hess (Reference Hess2015) found that focus on equity in team member recruitment and focus on team outcomes facilitated the development of shared leadership. Moreover, Elloy (Reference Elloy2008), in a paper mill study, found team training, focused on collaborative communication, to be linked to the development of shared leadership. From a different perspective, DeRue, Nahrgang, and Ashford (Reference DeRue, Nahrgang and Ashford2015) found perceptions of warmth (characterized by: benevolence, trustworthiness, and liking), and a shared understanding of network cues to be linked to the development of shared leadership.

A related line of inquiry that has gained traction in the literature is focused on the role of coaching (e.g., Bono, Purvanova, Towler, & Peterson, Reference Bono, Purvanova, Towler and Peterson2009; Leonard & Goff, Reference Leonard and Goff2003). In this regard, Carson et al. (Reference Carson, Tesluk and Marrone2007), as well as Cordery et al. (Reference Cordery, Soo, Kirkman, Rosen and Mathieu2009), both found various forms of coaching to be positively linked to the demonstration and development of shared leadership. In total, organizational support systems and structures appear to be a critical ingredient when it comes to the development of shared leadership.

Cultural Context

While vertical leadership from above, as well as organizational support systems and structures have been linked to shared leadership development, another broad category of antecedents to shared leadership entails cultural context. Cultural context includes factors as broad as national and organizational culture, to shared team member values. Konu and Viitanen (Reference Konu and Viitanen2008), for example, identified team values as an important predictor of the development of shared leadership. Similarly, Carson et al. (Reference Carson, Tesluk and Marrone2007), as well as Serban and Roberts (Reference Serban and Roberts2016) and Wu, Cormican, and Chen (Reference Wu, Cormican and Chen2020), as well as Carvalho, Sobral, and Mansur (Reference Carvalho, Sobral and Mansur2020), found what they labeled internal environments of groups, where there were higher levels of participative safety present, to be linked to the development of shared leadership (e.g., where environments that support shared voice, social support, and purpose). They found that this is where the internal culture of the team is intentionally set up to enable members to offer others leadership influence.

In a study conducted in innovation labs, Rose, Groeger, and Hölzle (Reference Rose, Groeger and Hölzle2021) learned that cultivating a culture of shared voice, room for experimentation, and organized opportunities for entrepreneurial thinking resulted in shared leadership emergence in creative environments. Another consideration was uncovered by the team of Coun, Gelderman, and Perez-Arendsen (Reference Coun, Gelderman and Perez-Arendsen2015), where they were able to compare two different groups of people, both who experienced a New Ways of Working (NWW, facilitated by new and high levels of information communications technology) rollout in the organization, but where one group also had an articulated emphasis placed on support structures for proactivity. The assumption was that the NWW (characterized by an open feedback culture, more autonomy and internally supported entrepreneurship) would facilitate shared leadership emergence in both groups, but this was not the case, as the group that did have the proactivity support did report shared leadership, while the other group did not.

Wood (Reference Wood2005), in a study of church leadership, found that perceptions of empowerment by teams and their members were predictive of shared leadership behavior. Similarly, institutional empowerment has been linked to shared leadership (Mi et al., 2023). Finally, Pearce et al. (Reference Pearce, Manz and Sims2014), across a number of qualitative studies, found organizational culture to be an important antecedent of shared leadership. Taken together, these studies point to an important role for cultural context as an important precursor of shared leadership.

Team Factors as Antecedents

Up until recently, the study related to antecedents included only the role that the vertical/formal leader played, organizational structures that help or harm, or cultural context factors in shared leadership emergence. However, there are now enough studies that have been done that a fourth category is needed – one that considers team factors separately. For example, Xu and Zhao (Reference Xu and Zhao2023), in a mixed methods study, found that the macro level shared leadership phenomenon was enabled through individual team member behaviors (in their model they observed three dimensions: collective achievement leadership, cohesive support leadership, and complementary expertise leadership).

Transactional knowledge and knowledge sharing within and between team members have also emerged as important antecedents, as has been found in various studies (e.g., Abson, & Schofield, Reference Abson and Schofield2022; Fransen et al., Reference Fransen, Delvaux, Mesquita and Van Puyenbroeck2018; Vandavasi et al., Reference Vandavasi, McConville, Uen and Yepuru2020). Fransen et al. (Reference Fransen, Delvaux, Mesquita and Van Puyenbroeck2018) also found that, in addition to their work on team transactional knowledge, the team members’ beliefs about each other’s competency, the perception of the other’s ability to complete a task well, was an important factor for shared leadership. Similarly, Lyndon, Pandey, and Navare, (Reference Lyndon, Pandey and Navare2022) found transactive memory systems to be positively related to shared leadership.

Another set of team-based antecedents are those related to the tasks that are expected from the team. Task interdependence, where team members are expected to rely on others’ skills, interact with, and also depend on others to accomplish a goal (Guzzo & Shea, 1992), was found to be an antecedent of shared leadership in several studies (e.g., Fausing et al., Reference Fausing, Joensson, Lewandowski and Bligh2015; Wu et al., Reference Wu, Cormican and Chen2020; Wu, Zhou, & Cormican, Reference Wu, Zhou and Cormican2023). Fausing et al. (Reference Fausing, Joensson, Lewandowski and Bligh2015) note that they base their empirical work on Pearce and Sims’ (Reference Pearce, Sims, Beyerlein, Johnson and Beyerlein2000) theoretical framework which highlighted the mutual cooperation, interaction, and guidance that is part of the shared leadership influence process, and also note that in contexts where interdependence is low, employees are also able to complete their work with less interaction with one another. This bears out the notion put forward by Wassenaar and Pearce (Reference Wassenaar, Pearce, Day and Antonakis2012, p. 382) that “shared leadership is applicable only to tasks where there is interdependency between the individuals involved.” Fausing et al. (Reference Fausing, Joensson, Lewandowski and Bligh2015) also found that goal interdependence, where the goals are specifically related to the work that is completed by the team itself and the members can see how their work fits into the completion of the whole, was a significant antecedent for shared leadership. Along this same vein, Hans and Gupta (Reference Hans and Gupta2018) noted that the job characteristics of skill variety, task significance, autonomy, and feedback are significantly supportive of shared leadership, thus suggesting the notion that job design is a critical component for shared leadership.

Van Zyl (Reference Van Zyl2020) found that team connectedness was a clear antecedent for shared leadership emergence in dispersed team members, but also notes that the type of interactions that generated the highest level of connectedness between these dispersed team members were informal connections made through shared interactions outside of formally organized settings. Building further on the type of team member interactions that are useful for shared leadership development, Ge et al. (Reference Ge, Liu and Zhang2024) found that team-based relationship- and task-oriented personality compositions positively impact reported shared leadership when mediated by team member exchange (TMX). Further, Abson and Schofield (Reference Abson and Schofield2022) note that empathy between the members in a team enhances the willingness for people to share influence among each other.

Team core self-evaluations (CSE) can also influence both the emergence and effectiveness (outcomes) of shared leadership (Siangchokyoo & Klinger, Reference Siangchokyoo and Klinger2022). As an example, they note that the amount of homogeneity and team collective identification in team members CSE influence the decisions of team members to share leadership. Building on the notion of collective identification within teams, Gu, Hu, and Hempel (Reference Gu, Hu and Hempel2022) found that the interdependence of team rewards and incentives positively supported more shared leadership in teams.

In an interesting study of both antecedents and outcomes of shared leadership, Hoch (Reference Hoch2013) found that team member integrity was positively associated with shared leadership. Finally, Rose et al., Reference Rose, Groeger and Hölzle2021 noted that voice, where team members feel enabled “to speak up and get involved” (Carson et al., Reference Carson, Tesluk and Marrone2007, p. 1223), was positively related to how much shared leadership was reported in the respondents studied. This bears out the earlier findings from Carson et al. (Reference Carson, Tesluk and Marrone2007), making voice an interesting factor to continue to study as part of shared leadership emergence. Darban (Reference Darban2022), in a university study with 341 students in 48 virtual teams, found that team empowerment and perceived virtuality were positively associated with shared leadership, in turn increasing the team members intention to learn, and to update their knowledge about a topic.

Rose et al. (Reference Rose, Groeger and Hölzle2021) note that the amount of shared leadership is also positively related to the team’s expected creativity of the work output as well as the task reflexivity – how much the team members reflect on the goals and so on that are expected of them and feel willing and enabled to adapt them to current or expected circumstances (West, Reference West1996). This idea particularly built on the theoretical work of Pearce (Reference Pearce2004), where it was noted that where tasks were highly interdependent, complex, and requiring creativity, shared leadership would also be more likely to be present and useful. Finally, Pearce and Ensley (Reference Pearce and Ensley2004), in a study of product and process improvement teams, provided a fairly comprehensive analysis of antecedents of shared leadership. They identified prior team performance, team potency, teamwork, courtesy, and altruism as positive predictors of shared leadership, as well as social loafing as a negative predictor of shared leadership. Figure 9 provides a graphic view of this study.

Figure 9 Antecedents of shared leadership in product and process improvement teams

Other Antecedents of Shared Leadership

Additional studies have examined factors that do not fall neatly into one of the above categories but have been linked to the development and display of shared leadership. Ropo and Sauer (Reference Ropo and Sauer2003), in a longitudinal study of orchestras, identified length of relationships between various members as an antecedent to shared leadership between orchestral constituents. Relatedly, Fransen et al., (Reference Fransen, Delvaux, Mesquita and Van Puyenbroeck2018) found that the amount of warmth-oriented traits (e.g., trustworthiness, helpfulness, and friendliness) that were exhibited by a team member are positively predictive of the amount of influence that team member would have in the group environment. Kang and Svensson (Reference Kang and Svensson2023) noted that the personality traits of extraversion and introversion are important to the development of shared leadership, in that extraverts are more likely to share easily, and introverts can be more intentionally supported by the leaders and other team members.

From a different tack, Chiu (Reference Chiu2014) found proactivity of team members to facilitate the development of shared leadership. Similarly, Pearce et al. (Reference Pearce, Manz and Sims2014) found proactivity, trust, and openness to be related to the development of shared leadership, across a number of qualitative studies, while Hooker and Csikszentmihalyi (Reference Hooker, Csikszentmihalyi, Pearce and Conger2003), in their study of research and development laboratories, identified the state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) as a foundational link in the development of shared leadership. Moreover, Paunova and Lee (Reference Paunova, Lee, Osland, Li and Mendenhall2016) found team learning orientation to be related to the development of shared leadership.

Muethel, Gehrlein, and Hoegl (Reference Muethel, Gehrlein and Hoegl2012), on the other hand, found demographic characteristics of groups affect the development of shared leadership. Kukenberger and I’Innocenzo (Reference Kukenberger and D’Innocenzo2020) note that certain types of diversity, such as gender diversity, will initially negatively impact the development of shared leadership, particularly in climates where cooperation is low, or the team is newly formed. However, as time passes, the impact of gender diversity will be mitigated, particularly in teams where task-related experiences are high. They also found that shared leadership was more present in teams who reported functional diversity and high levels of a cooperative climate. Serban and Roberts (Reference Serban and Roberts2016) identified task cohesion as well as task ambiguity as factors related to shared leadership development. Finally, Hess (Reference Hess2015) found face-to-face teams to be more inclined to demonstrate and develop shared leadership than their virtual team counterparts. Together, these studies demonstrate a range of additional factors associated with the development of shared leadership.

Summary of the Empirical Examination of Antecedents of Shared Leadership

While there has lately been an increase in the number of studies (both qualitative and quantitative) on the antecedents of shared leadership, there are still far fewer relative to research on the outcomes of shared leadership. Nonetheless, given the clear value of shared leadership in many settings, there is a great deal of opportunity for more development in this area. Given this, we will specify some further possibilities for research on antecedents of shared leadership in Section 5. In the next section, however, we detail the work that has been done regarding the outcomes of shared leadership.

Shared Leadership and Team-Level Outcomes

The examination of the team level consequences of shared leadership has been grounded in the general group/teams’ research literature, which suggests that team effectiveness – an umbrella term defined in the section called shared leadership and overall team effectiveness – encompasses four categories: performance, attitudes, cognition, and behaviors (Cohen & Bailey, Reference Cohen and Bailey1997; Cox, Pearce & Perry, Reference Cox, Pearce, Perry, Pearce and Conger2003), with each one of these categories potentially subjected to the influence of shared leadership. Other authors (e.g., Nicolaides et al., Reference Nicolaides, LaPort and Chen2014; Zhu et al., Reference Zhu, Liao, Yam and Johnson2018; Pearce et al., Reference Pearce, Houghton and Manz2023) split the consequences of shared leadership into proximal outcomes (e.g., team affective tone or team efficacy) and distal outcomes (e.g., team performance or team creativity), arguing that proximal outcomes transfer the influence shared leadership to, and, in turn, relate to distal outcomes. Both systematizations of the outcomes, however, may be traced back to the input-process-output model of team effectiveness (IPO), which we explain briefly in the next paragraph before we outline the specifics of the shared leadership outcomes.

Shared Leadership and Overall Team Effectiveness

As an umbrella term, team effectiveness encompasses performance as well as other team-level outcomes. Extant team effectiveness research dates to almost sixty years ago when McGrath (Reference McGrath1964) advanced the so-called input-process-output (IPO) model for studying and analyzing the functioning of systems, including teams and organizations. This conceptual model breaks down a system into three main components – Inputs, Processes, and Outputs – and is often applied to the study and assessment of team effectiveness. Figure 10 contains a team context version of this model.

Figure 10 Input-process-output model of team effectiveness

As represented by the figure and as noted by Mathieu and colleagues, in the IPO model “Inputs describe antecedent factors that enable and constrain members’ interactions” (2008, p. 412). Inputs may be individual, such as individual team member characteristics (e.g., competence, personality); team, such as team task structure, team composition, or leadership, and contextual and organizational, such as environmental factors (e.g., external environment complexity or organizational factors, such as organizational climate or organizational structure). These inputs serve as antecedents for various processes, which describe members’ interactions directed toward task accomplishment. Historically, team processes have been categorized as “taskwork” – or processes describing functions that team members engage in for team task accomplishment, and “teamwork” – or interactions between team members. In 2001, Marks and colleagues offered a new taxonomy, which discusses transition, action and interpersonal team processes, which have a more temporal nature and refer to planning and coordination activities, task-accomplishment related activities, and the more transient interpersonal processes, which include conflict management, trust building and similar interpersonal processes. Finally, outputs describe the results, outcomes, or products generated by the system, as a result of the processes applied to the inputs. In the context of teams, outputs can include the overall team performance, the achievement of the team’s goals, or timely project completion. Outcomes, however, can also include more attitudinal, cognitive, or behavioral-based aspects such as increased knowledge, team members’ cohesion, team vitality, and similar. In other words, “outcomes are results and by-products of team activity that are valued by one or more constituencies” (Mathieu et al., Reference Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp and Gilson2008). In the literature using the IPO model, leadership (including shared leadership) is usually treated as an antecedent factor (or input), and sometimes as a process, which influences several outputs. As seen from the figure and in the previous paragraphs, team effectiveness comprises both performance and other outcomes, with performance encompassing objective and subjective performance, and other outcomes encompassing team members’ attitudinal (e.g., team members’ overall satisfaction, commitment), cognitive (e.g., mental models) and behavioral outcomes (e.g., cooperation, helping and similar).

Defined as a “simultaneous, ongoing, mutual influential process” (Pearce Reference Pearce2004, p. 48), shared leadership is a leadership process that is enacted through social interactions among team members (Conger & Pearce, Reference Pearce and Jay2003), thus fostering positive outcomes for the team. For example, Hoch and Dulebohn (Reference Hoch2013) advocate for improved decision-making process, whereas Bergman, Rentsch, Small, Davenport, and Bergman (Reference Bergman, Rentsch, Small, Davenport and Bergman2012) argue that shared leadership contributes to team cohesion, team consensus, and satisfaction through team members’ improved knowledge exchange and motivation to take responsibility for the team success. Shared leadership also positively influences team effectiveness by promoting teamwork, shared mentality, and increased knowledge sharing among team members (e.g., Bligh, Pearce & Kohles, Reference Bligh, Pearce and Kohles2006; Erkutlu, Reference Erkutlu2012) and it also serves as a facilitator of effective group decision making (Hoch, Reference Hoch2013). Additionally, shared leadership contributes to the creation of a good working environment through the development of close relationships among employees (Hoch, Reference Hoch2013; Choi, Kim & Kang, Reference Choi, Kim and Kang2017) because team members who interact closely and share leadership responsibilities are more likely to have lower levels of conflict and stress (Wood & Fields, 2007; Daspit et al., Reference Daspit, Justice Tillman, Boyd and Mckee2013).

Thus, research advocates for an overall positive relationship between shared leadership and overall team effectiveness. Perhaps the most comprehensive longitudinal empirical analysis of the relationship between shared leadership and effectiveness, Pearce and Ensley (Reference Pearce and Ensley2004) found a significant effect of shared leadership on team cognition, team behavior, and team performance (see Figure 11). In addition to many primary studies that find support for a direct positive relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness (e.g., Choi, Kim, & Kang, Reference Choi, Kim and Kang2017; Daspit Justice Tillman, Boyd, & Mckee, Reference Daspit, Justice Tillman, Boyd and Mckee2013; Pearce & Sims, Reference Pearce and Sims2002), this finding is supported by a number of meta-analytical investigations: Wang and colleagues (Reference Wang, Waldman and Zhang2014) report an overall effect size of r = .29 between shared leadership and team effectiveness, whereas Wu et al. (Reference Wu, Cormican and Chen2020) who examine the relationship between shared leadership and what they call “overall outcomes”, report an effect size of r = .31. As a result, researchers and practitioners alike commonly treat shared leadership as a positive antecedent of team effectiveness.

Figure 11 Outcomes of shared visionary leadership in product and process improvement teams

Moderators of the Shared Leadership – Team Outcomes Relationship

Figure 12 visually summarizes the potential moderators of the shared leadership – team outcomes relationship. To facilitate the review of the state of the literature, we have categorized the moderators into two large groups: substantive moderators, which include team characteristics, team processes, and team (members) attitudes and emergent team states; and methodological moderators, which include team type, shared leadership measure, performance measure, and study setting. In addition, although not traditionally treated as moderators, research discusses differential implications of shared leadership for the different types of team outcomes, which, as noted in Figure 12, can be classified as performance, attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes. We start our discussion with the differential implications of shared leadership for different team outcomes, and then we proceed to summarize the role of methodological and team characteristics moderators.

Figure 12 Moderators of the shared leadership – team outcomes relationship

Shared leadership and different team outcomes. Both primary and secondary studies examine the different implications of shared leadership for team performance, team attitudes, team cognition, and team (group) behavioral outcomes. From a theoretical perspective, scholars often argue that shared leadership is differentially related to the various team outcomes criteria. One theoretical reason for this lies in the aforementioned IPO model, which describes team attitudes, cognition, and behaviors as a more proximal, directly influenced by shared leadership, which in turn transfers influence to the more distant outcome of team performance. Other researchers argue that as an emergent team phenomenon, shared leadership is conceptually more similar to teams’ attitudes, cognition, and behaviors; hence, it has a stronger relationship with similar concepts. Both arguments have merit, but the empirical evidence is mixed and inconclusive. For example, in their secondary examination, Wang and colleagues (Reference Wang, Waldman and Zhang2014) find that shared leadership relates to attitudinal outcomes and behavioral processes and emergent states outcomes stronger (at r = .39 and .37 respectively) than to objective and subjective team performance (at r = .22 and .16 respectively). Wang and colleagues also find that the confidence intervals around the reported correlations are not overlapping, thus concluding there is sufficient evidence for differential relationships. On the other hand, in another secondary examination, Wu and colleagues (Reference Wu, Cormican and Chen2020) report that “although shared leadership demonstrates different relationships with group behavior processes (ρ = .28), attitudinal outcomes (ρ = .25), team cognition (ρ = .44), and team performance (ρ = .37), their 95% confidence intervals overlap with one another.” The same authors go on to conclude that there is no evidence that there is difference in the relationship between shared leadership and the different team outcomes and call for additional research to clarify the extant conflicting results.

Substantive moderators of the shared leadership – team outcomes relationship: team characteristics. Substantive moderators in the relationship between shared leadership and team outcomes can significantly influence how effective shared leadership is within a team. This section highlights some of the findings, although the examples given here should not be treated as an exhaustive list. For example, team characteristics, such as team size, team composition, task interdependence, and task complexity have often been positioned as important factors, which can influence the effectiveness of shared leadership. Larger teams, for example, might face more challenges in coordinating and communicating effectively under shared leadership, while smaller teams might find it easier to share leadership roles, which would suggest that the influence of shared leadership would be stronger in smaller teams. However, as noted by Nicolaides and colleagues, team size “can be both an asset and a liability for teams” (p. 926). Thus, in primary studies Lorinkova and Bartol (Reference Lorinkova and Bartol2021) find that smaller teams reach and sustain higher levels of shared leadership throughout their life cycle. In their secondary analysis, however, Nicolaides et al. (Reference Nicolaides, LaPort and Chen2014) fail to find evidence for an interaction effect of shared leadership and team size.

Another team factor that can potentially interact with shared leadership and amend its effects on team outcomes is the characteristics of the team task. The argument here is that shared leadership may be more appropriate in some situations, and not in others. Specifically, task complexity may be an important factor, because shared leadership is a complex, team-level phenomenon, more time-consuming in its emergence and development than traditional vertical leadership, likely benefiting teams with more complex tasks, which require higher levels of interactions and coordination among team members. Similar to the moderating role of team size, however, the moderating role of task complexity does not warrant a definitive conclusion. For example, in their secondary examination, based on forty-two independent samples, Wang and colleagues (Reference Wang, Waldman and Zhang2014) uncovered a positive relationship between work complexity and the effect size of shared leadership with team effectiveness. On the other hand, in another secondary examination, D’Innocenzo et al. (2016) find a significant negative effect of task complexity on the magnitude of the shared leadership – team performance relationship. Examples from primary studies are similarly inconclusive. As a result, researchers agree on the notion that task complexity is an important moderator to consider when studying shared leadership and its influences; however, the specific role of task complexity is still to be found.

Another critical moderator in the relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness is task interdependence. It refers to the degree to which team members are dependent on one another to complete their work. This concept becomes particularly important in shared leadership models, as it influences how team members interact, collaborate, and share responsibilities. With high task interdependence, the sharing of knowledge and skills becomes vital. Shared leadership fosters an environment where multiple members contribute their expertise, leading to more informed decision-making and problem-solving. In addition, high task interdependence encourages team members to collaborate more closely. In such settings, shared leadership can be more effective because team members are already reliant on each other for information, resources, and support. Meta-analysis, however, do not find a conclusive support for the positive role of task interdependence (e.g., D’Innocenzo et al., 2016).

Team virtuality, referring to the extent to which team members use digital communication technologies to interact and collaborate with each other, often across different locations, is another important moderator of the relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness. The rise of remote work and global teams has made understanding the impact of team virtuality on shared leadership more crucial. Different theoretical arguments can be put forward on the role of virtuality in teams. On the one hand, communication challenges, due to the lack of face-to-face interaction, can impede the development of trust and mutual understanding in virtual teams. This can affect how shared leadership is established and maintained within the team, suggesting the need for more traditional leadership in highly virtual teams. On the other hand, as suggested by Pearce and Conger (Reference Pearce and Conger2003), when teams feel empowered to share leadership responsibilities, they communicate more and interact more frequently, which in turn positively influences a number of team outcomes, including members’ satisfaction, commitment to the team, and performance. We are not aware of any meta-analysis examining the moderating role of team virtuality; primary investigations, however, report inconclusive results. In an experimental study, Drescher and Garbers (Reference Drescher and Garbers2016) find that shared leadership leads to higher performance and greater satisfaction in virtual teams than in face-to-face teams. In a field study, Hoch and Kozlowski (Reference Hoch and Kozlowski2014) argue that the positive relationship between shared leadership and team performance increases as virtuality increases, yet fail to find support for this hypothesis.

Team size and team tenure are two team characteristics that have garnered researchers’ attention in their quest for explaining team factors. As noted by a host of teams’ researchers, team size can be both an asset and a liability (e.g., Maier, Reference Maier1967; Lorinkova & Bartol, Reference Lorinkova and Bartol2021; Shaw, Reference Shaw1981). Larger teams, for example, have larger decision-making and processing capabilities and also include more team members with diverse viewpoints and experience, which can facilitate innovation, flexibility, and creativity. Communication and coordination problems, however, are exacerbated in larger teams, and because individual contributions are less visible in larger teams, members are less likely to contribute individual efforts to the team task (Karau & Williams, Reference Karau and Williams1993; Kidwell & Bennett, Reference Kidwell and Bennett1993). Primary studies generally find that larger teams report lower levels of shared leadership (e.g., Karriker et al., Reference Karriker, Madden and Katell2017; Lorinkova & Bartol, Reference Lorinkova and Bartol2021), whereas meta-analytical examinations find that team size does not appear to augment the effect of shared leadership on team performance (Nicolaides et al., Reference Nicolaides, LaPort and Chen2014). As far as team tenure is concerned, the same authors find that team tenure reduces the positive effect of shared leadership on team performance, suggesting that the positive effects of shared leadership may be time dependent – an issue we discuss later.

Overall, researchers agree on the notion that team characteristics such as team size, team tenure, task interdependence and complexity, team virtuality, and similar issues may significantly impact the effectiveness of shared leadership. However, definitive empirical evidence regarding the impact of these moderators remains elusive. Additionally, moderators such as team composition, or the diversity of skills, personalities, and backgrounds in a team, may impact how shared leadership translates into team outcomes. Teams with a mix of complementary skills and perspectives may find it easier to establish shared leadership, yet teams with diverse skillsets and personality may need higher levels of shared leadership to guide their interactions. Therefore, understanding the complexity of how shared leadership emerges and operates in teams with different characteristics is an important agenda for future research.

Substantive moderators of the shared leadership – team outcomes relationship: team processes. Team processes are usually discussed as antecedents or outcomes of shared leadership, although examples of team processes as moderators of the effects of shared leadership can also be found. The role of team processes as antecedents is discussed in the previous section of this Element. In that section we also highlight some of the team processes that have been examined as outcomes of shared leadership. As far as moderation is concerned, Hoch, Pearce, and Welzel (Reference Hoch, Pearce and Welzel2010) found coordination (as well as team age diversity) to moderate the relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness. Another example for a team process treated as a moderator can be found in the work of Michalache and colleagues (Reference Mihalache, Jansen, Bosch and Volberda2014), who examined the role of shared leadership in top-management teams (TMTs) as a predictor of organizational ambidexterity (or, the extent to which organizations engage in both exploratory and exploitative innovation). These authors report that the effect of shared leadership on organizational ambidexterity is mediated by conflict management style and decision-making comprehensiveness. Further, they found “the interaction term between TMT shared leadership and connectedness has a positive and significant effect on TMT cooperative management style (β = 0.23, p < 0.01) and … a positive and significant effect of the interaction between TMT shared leadership and connectedness on TMT decision comprehensiveness (β = 0.23, p < 0.01)” (Michalante et al., Reference Mihalache, Jansen, Bosch and Volberda2014, p. 140).

Among the numerous team attitudes, cognition, and emergent states that have been studied, team trust has probably garnered the most attention. Closely related to team trust is the concept of psychological safety, with high trust and safety potentially enhancing collaboration and the willingness to take on leadership roles. The problem with studying trust as a moderator is that unlike team characteristics (team size, tenure, autonomy, interdependence, and similar, to name a few), which are independent from shared leadership, trust, as a relational factor is linked to shared leadership; trust can precede shared leadership, thus serving as an antecedent of shared leadership, but trust can also be the consequence of shared leadership. Trust can also exist independently from shared leadership; for example, if team members know each other and have worked together on previous projects or different teams. Finally, similar to shared leadership, trust can also be treated as an emergent team state, which evolves over time, changing and influencing changes in shared leadership. In fact, in one of the few longitudinal studies, examining shared leadership development, Drescher and colleagues (Reference Drescher, Korsgaard, Welpe, Picot and Wigand2014) suggest that positive development in team trust is one of the routes through which changes in shared leadership bring benefits to team performance. In their meta-analytical examination, Wu and colleagues (Reference Wu, Cormican and Chen2020) uncovered that intragroup trust moderates the positive relationship between shared leadership and team outcomes, “such that this relationship is more positive when intragroup trust is higher rather than lower” (p. 58). Regardless of how trust is treated, however, there is conclusive evidence in research that shared leadership and trust in teams are positively related (Drescher et al., Reference Drescher, Korsgaard, Welpe, Picot and Wigand2014; Wu et al., Reference Wu, Cormican and Chen2020). Similar to trust, team social support – or the extent to which team members care for and encourage each other – has been found to accentuate the emergence and the positive effects of shared leadership (Carson et al., Reference Carson, Tesluk and Marrone2007; Lorinkova & Bartol, Reference Lorinkova and Bartol2021).

Methodological moderators of the shared leadership – team outcomes relationship. Primary studies seldom examine methodological moderators, and instead usually focus on what are often called substantive moderators or, as we refer to, team characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes. Meta-analysis, however, has placed a lot of attention to methodological moderators, in an attempt to clarify the specifics of the shared leadership–team outcomes relationship. One of the more frequently examined methodological moderators is the specific shared leadership measurement. Wang and colleagues (Reference Wang, Waldman and Zhang2014) investigated the moderating role of the shared leadership measurement referent (the whole team as the referent for measuring shared leadership, each peer as the referent, and each member rating him/herself) but did not find any differences, concluding that “the relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness did not differ across the various referents” (p. 190). Team type has also frequently been examined and found to moderate relationships between antecedents and team outcomes. Wang and colleagues did not explicitly hypothesize but found that there was no significant difference in shared leadership effectiveness in student versus work teams. A similar conclusion was reached by Nicolaides and colleagues, who examined the role of shared leadership in three different types of teams such as decision making, action, and project teams, but found that team type did not interact with shared leadership to predict team performance. In the same study, sample type: field versus school (which coincides with work vs. student teams) also did not have a moderating role on the effect of shared leadership. Sample type, however, was found to exert a significant moderating effect in the study of D’Innocenzo et al. (2016), with shared leadership effect on team performance being higher for field, as compared to classroom/lab samples. In the most-recent meta-analysis, Wu and colleagues (Reference Wu, Cormican and Chen2020) fail to support the moderating role of sample/team type and report that “the relationship between shared leadership and team outcomes does not differ across the different team settings” (p. 59). It appears that in the majority of the published work, shared leadership appears to be equally effective across different types of teams. Similarly, it appears that the measurement of the specific team outcomes – namely objective versus subjective – does not significantly influence the relationship between shared leadership and team outcomes. Although effect size is slightly higher for subjectively assessed team outcomes, the difference between subjective and objective assessment is not significantly different.

The role of time: temporal dynamics of shared leadership. It is important to understand how time affects the patterns and effectiveness of shared leadership in groups, because scholars have highlighted that shared leadership is a time‐varying, inherently dynamic team process (Carson et al., Reference Carson, Tesluk and Marrone2007; Pearce & Conger, Reference Pearce and Conger2003; Pearce, Reference Pearce2004; Pearce et al., Reference Pearce, Houghton and Manz2023; Pearce & van Knippenberg, Reference Pearce and van Knippenberg2024; Pearce, van Knippenberg, & Kirchoff, Reference Pearce, van Knippenberg and Kirchhoff2024). Yet, few studies in extant research focus on the dynamic nature of shared leadership to explain how shared leadership changes over time. A notable exception is the study of Drescher et al. (Reference Drescher, Korsgaard, Welpe, Picot and Wigand2014), who found that positive changes in shared leadership were associated with positive changes in group performance, with the relationship partially mediated by positive changes in group trust. In another study (although not longitudinal by design) Wu and Cormican (Reference Wu and Cormican2021), studying twenty-six engineering project-design teams, found that the stage of the project life cycle influences the positive relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness, such that this relationship is stronger at the early phase of the project. Additionally, in a study examining sixty-six self-managed executive MBA teams, Wang et al. (Reference Wang, Jiang, Liu and Ma2017) found that shared leadership enabled team learning behaviors at the early stages of teams’ work together, but not at the middle and later stages of the task. In perhaps the most notable study, which examines shared leadership dynamic effectiveness, Lorinkova and Bartol (Reference Lorinkova and Bartol2021) study how shared leadership changes over the course of self-managed project teams’ life cycle and how the change in shared leadership related to team performance. In particular, they find that shared leadership increases early in the team’s life cycle, peaks around the midpoint, and then decreases in the later phase, with this non-uniform, approximating inverted U-shape change pattern positively relating to team performance. Although the four studies explained previously in the section reach somewhat differing conclusions, one common theme runs across the studies: shared leadership is an important predictor of team effectiveness; however, additional research is needed to uncover the specific role of time.

Overarching Critical Issues for Future Studies of Shared Leadership

There are seven critical issues regarding the future study of shared leadership: (1) definition drift, (2) weak qualitative studies, (3) need for greater understanding of antecedents, (4) over-focus on direct effects, (5) lack of multi-level studies, (6) lack of studies of the dark side of shared leadership, and (7) lack of truly longitudinal studies. We discuss each of these seven issues in the following paragraphs.

Lack of Multi-level Studies

Early in the development of shared leadership theory Pearce (Reference Pearce1997) and Pearce and Sims (Reference Pearce, Sims, Beyerlein, Johnson and Beyerlein2000) specifically articulated the multi-level nature of the concept. Even so, the multi-level study of shared leadership has generally been limited to the examination of vertical and shared leadership in tandem (e.g., Ensley et al., Reference Ensley, Hmieleski and Pearce2006; Pearce & Sims, Reference Pearce and Sims2002). While such studies are useful, they lack the nuance of the real-life enactment of shared leadership. For example, Bligh, Pearce, and Kohles (Reference Bligh, Pearce and Kohles2006) theorized that the specific individual-level phenomenon in groups/teams would morph through meso-processes into the display of shared leadership, yet no known studies have fully investigated this angle (see Figure 13). The point here is that there is far more to be learned from investigating the multi-level nature of shared leadership and that the extant literature is lacking in this regard.

Figure 13 Example multi-level psychological processes and shared leadership

Research Imperatives for Shared Leadership

While previous studies of shared leadership have certainly moved the scientific dialogue forward, future studies need to go much further. In general, the field has done a respectable job of establishing that shared leadership is a valid construct and that it has predictive validity, above and beyond leadership from a vertical leader. It is indeed time for a reboot that will clarify, codify, and elevate the rigor of studies on shared leadership theory. Here, however, we offer four important imperatives and one alternative perspective regarding shared leadership theory and research.

A New Frontier for Shared Leadership

We need to complete the paradigm shift that is underway in the field of leadership: all leadership is shared leadership; it is simply a matter of degree. While much has been learned through examining vertical leaders, it is clear from the evidence that not investigating shared leadership processes as part of the social leadership equation is missing a very important aspect of social leadership. For example, Pearce and Sims (Reference Pearce and Sims2002) directly compared the amount of variance of team effectiveness explained by vertical versus shared leadership and revealed that shared leadership is a more robust predictor. Multiple meta-analysis studies reinforce this finding (e.g., Nicolaides et al., Reference Nicolaides, LaPort and Chen2014; Wang et al., Reference Wang, Waldman and Zhang2014).

There are three fundamental dimensions along which the sharing of leadership can be assessed. First, is the centralization of power. With entirely centralized power, for instance, the amount of shared leadership approaches zero. Logically, it follows that in an environment where power is entirely decentralized, shared leadership is far more likely to develop. The second dimension, level of engagement, describes how actively team members are involved in leading one another. At one extreme would be un-engagement, or apathy, while on the other end would be full engagement, and a concomitant high level of shared leadership. The third dimension is type of influence, and it ranges from rudimentary influence, which is typically focused on base influence strategies such as being directive, to comprehensive influence strategies relying on a full range of situationally appropriate influence, including such influence strategies as vision, inspiration, empowerment, and transactional engagement (see Figure 5).

The more comprehensive the influence type, the more potential there is for shared leadership. Taken together, high centralization of power, low engagement, and rudimentary types of influence would be characteristic of low levels of shared leadership, while low power centralization, high levels of engagement, and comprehensive types of influence are characteristic of high levels of shared leadership. Figure 14 provides a three-dimensional view of the fundamental components that comprise the continuum of shared leadership.

Figure 14 All leadership is shared … it’s just a matter of degree

By framing all leadership as shared leadership, using these three dimensions as a foil, we anticipate far greater understanding of social leadership processes and effects. This type of framing is poised to provide the next giant leap in the scientific study of leadership.

Summary Regarding Future Research on Shared Leadership

The most insightful issue for the future research on leadership is framing of all social leadership is shared leadership, that it is just a matter of degree. Of course, it is perfectly valid to focus future research on just vertical leaders, but such research needs to acknowledge the incomplete nature of the data, as vertical leaders are clearly part of the equation of shared leadership. More robust qualitative studies that can enrich the foundations of research in this area are very much needed. Building on such discoveries, quantitative studies need to attend to far more complex and nuanced examinations of the phenomenon. No matter what, we encourage scholars to examine the table detailing the research domains and research questions for shared leadership provided in this section as a source of inspiration for future research studies.

Individual-Level Advice

Every social process begins with individuals. If individuals refuse to participate with others in social processes, such as shared leadership, the process will be rocky, at best. In this regard, individual egos, while essential, must be kept in check for shared leadership to thrive. This is easy to say but much harder to put into practice, especially over the medium- to long-term. For example, smart people, with a high need for achievement, that is, those that are essential to enabling progress, often find it challenging to keep their egos in check in team-based work. Nevertheless, setting individual egos aside, at least temporarily, is essential for moving from the “I” to the “we” as a reference point for shared leadership; That is, there needs to be a shift toward collective identity. In today’s knowledge intensive work environment, the vast majority of work product relies upon collaborative efforts between capable and motivated individuals (see Pearce, Reference Pearce2004, Reference Pearce, Pearce, Macieriello and Yamawaki (eds.)2010), and this requires moving beyond the egos of individuals.

Beyond individual ego suspension and collective identification, individuals involved in shared leadership must have well-honed listening skills and they must be open to others’ ideas, thoughts, opinions, and perspectives (while ultimately also being able to evaluate such ideas objectively in order to bring focus to the team efforts). Finally, it is imperative that anyone involved shared leadership must be a capable leader in their own right. In other words, everybody involved in the shared leadership process must be able to effectively engage in appropriately influencing other members of the team. For shared leadership to be optimally effective, depending on the knowledge, skills, and abilities on the individuals involved and the task requirements of the situation at hand, everybody needs to be an active and engaged leader. While it is clearly possible to dig deeper, these are the core pieces of advice for individuals, for the practice of shared leadership.

Group/Team-Level Advice

At the team-level of analysis trust is the key issue. Trust is essential for shared leadership. If individuals do not trust one another, shared leadership is, at best, a non-starter. The reality, however, is probably much worse. When individuals in teams do not trust one another, they tend to undermine each other and derail potential progress. In fact, trust is such a foundational force in social interactions that it has even been linked to the economic development of nations, such that nations with low trust levels have extremely poor economic outcomes. As groups and teams are the building blocks of larger social entities, such as departments and organizations, they are the key units in which trust must be built. Here, transparency of communication, where there is a norm of being respectful and listening, is fundamental to creating a trusting environment. This facilitates knowledge sharing and simultaneously discourages second-guessing, each of which are essential to creating a trusting environment.

Beyond a trusting and open environment, for shared leadership to be especially effective, it requires what scholars call transactive memory. Transactive memory entails being aware of which team members have which knowledge, skills, and abilities that are relevant to the tasks of the team. Transactive memory is critical to ensure smooth leadership transitions between the most appropriate team members, and it also helps to prevent power hording by a particular individual or subset of the team.

Early in team life, it is not always reasonable to expect well-developed transactive memory within the team. In this case, we advocate encouraging the active debate and discussion of ideas, thoughts, and perspectives and actively encouraging team norms that stress the importance of constructively challenging of each other’s input. We also advocate the creation of opportunities for team members to get to know each other in a structured setting outside of the boundaries of the main focus of work. These are the key pieces of group/team-level advice we advocate regarding shared leadership.

Organization-Level Advice

Shifting our attention to larger collectives of people, like organizations, brings different issues to the fore, with respect to shared leadership deployment. Here the paramount issue is ensuring that there is a clear, compelling, and commonly understood vision regarding the driving purpose of the organization. Without a clear and shared vision, groups/teams at any level of the organization will undoubtedly work at cross-purposes (or worse). With all of that said, shared leadership can be harnessed to facilitate the creation of a common or shared vision, thereby ensuring the vision is compelling, is complete, and enjoys true buy-in from core constituencies, as elaborated by Berson, Waldman and Pearce (Reference Berson, Waldman and Pearce2016).

Beyond shared vision, shared values are also critically important in organization-wide shared leadership practice. Shared values are one of the very few true long-term sources of competitive advantage for organizations. Each organization should focus on crafting values that are unique to their overarching purpose and that facilitate alignment of shared leadership throughout the organization. The only specific values we recommend in this regard are a focus on fairness and ethics – these were found to be useful antecedents to shared leadership as shown in Section 3. Other than these basic values each organization will need to carefully consider which values should be emphasized and encouraged. For instance, for some it will be a focus on creativity, while for others it might entail a focus on reliability. The upshot is that shared cultural values provide an organizing mechanism though which shared leadership can be developed and leveraged to enhance competitive advantage.

Empowerment is another key consideration from the organizational-level point of view. We advocate empowering nearly everyone in organizations, at least somewhat. It is indeed an unusual person (not to say that they don’t exist) that is not capable of taking on some leadership responsibility and thereby positively contributing to organizational success, and most people will clearly say that they value being empowered over almost any other organizational experience. This is why we believe that knowledge, skills, and abilities should almost always trump organizational status. This, of course, can be uncomfortable for novice organizational leaders but it can also be rather rewarding, in that through the process of empowering they gain loyalty from their followers, the possibility of new ways of solving old problems, buy-in to shared goals, and many other positive outcomes that are too extensive to list here. In summary, these are the key pieces of advice we advocate for shared leadership deployment, from the organizational-level point of view.

Human Resources Practice Advice

Human resource policies and practices are an area that requires special attention when it comes to shared leadership. Most human resource professionals, for instance, are overly focused on creating stifling bureaucratic fiefdoms that only serve to enhance the power of the human resource function. These proclivities must be weeded out if shared leadership is to thrive. Thus, selection is the single most important thing that can be done, from an HR perspective, when it comes to shared leadership, and a very useful place to start is on selecting the right HR professionals – people who understand not just the legal components of HR but also keep up on the organizational development innovations in their field, understand assessment processes, and clearly comprehend that they are in a support role.

Different circumstances (different visions and different core values), quite naturally, require different types of individuals. As such, person/job fit, person/organization fit, and person/situation fit are the key concerns when it comes to selection. Unfortunately, most people are abysmal at selecting the right people. In this the fault lies both with HR but also with the various functions working with HR to select people. We know that people are subconsciously biased towards people who resemble them, who have similar educational backgrounds, who have had parallel organizational paths, and so on. But that native human nature is not going to always result in the best hire for both the job, but also to support a shared leadership environment. Therefore, organizational leaders need to work hand in hand with HR to find the people who truly embody both the values they espouse, who are the people they need, not just the ones they want.

There are, however, a couple of exemplary organizations – Southwest Airlines and W. L. Gore – that provide strong guidance on how to get it right. Pearce et al. (Reference Pearce, Manz and Sims2014) provide detailed accounts of how these organizations consistently outperform others when it comes to selection and we encourage using them as role models. Beyond selection, shared leadership also benefits greatly from ongoing support in the form of education, training, and development. Most such efforts in organizations focus on appointed leaders or upon people identified as “high potentials” but this is simply insufficient, when it comes to shared leadership. We advocate much more inclusive education, training, and development efforts. Relatedly, evaluation and assessment efforts, which are generally used to justify remuneration for people, need to be broadened to be used much more for developmental purposes. Finally, compensation, in most organizations, needs to be totally rethought. While nearly every organization claims that they value teamwork, precious few actually practice what they preach, and reward people based on team or group outcomes, yet we know that shared vision, goals, and rewards lead to more shared leadership (see Section 3). There are several different ways to build group-based and team-based compensation into organizational HR routines. For example, gainsharing (e.g., O’Bannon & Pearce, Reference O’Bannon and Craig1999) is one such method but each organization will require a tailored approach. Taken together, these are a few of the key human resources practices we advocate for shared leadership success.

Putting It All Together

It is all well and good to think about the science of shared leadership but, ultimately, the most critical issue is putting shared leadership into practice (Pearce & Manz, Reference Pearce and Manz2014). Here we have illuminated the key pieces of advice, gleaned from the literature, as well as from our own executive and consulting experience, to help develop, deploy, and embed shared leadership in organizations. We focused this advice on four key areas: individual-level advice, group/team-level advice, organization-level advice, and human resources practice advice. While we broke down these pieces of advice into definable chucks, we believe they work best in concert. With that said, every situation is different and you will need to create your own tailored approach.