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Shared Leadership in Organisations: A Mixed-Method Approach.

Publication date: 2023-02-17

Author:

Edelmann, Charlotte
Fransen, Katrien ; Stouten, Jeroen ; Boen, Filip ; Vande Broek, Gert

Abstract:

Scientific summary Throughout history, leadership has been seen as one of the most important determinants of team effectiveness. In the last decade, a radical shift has occurred away from the traditional emphasis on vertical leadership (i.e., where the leader is positioned hierarchically above the team) towards the idea that leadership should be shared. Such a shared leadership approach implies that leadership not only emanates from the formal leader, but also from team members. However, to date, knowledge on how to optimally implement the different shared leadership implementations in practice is sparse. In the present project, we aim to provide an answer to four important questions when implementing shared leadership: (1) what are the perceived advantages and disadvantages of different shared leadership implementations?, (2) are the peer leadership roles from sports research also valid in organisational teams?, (3) which organisation-specific roles and underlying functions should be fulfilled by formal leaders and peer leaders?, and (4) what are the most important peer leadership roles and functions for different organisational outcomes? To answer these four questions, we brought together our experience in the sport setting (i.e., with respect to the implementation of a shared leadership approach) with the acquired knowledge in the organisational context (i.e., with respect to leadership development). A mixed-method approach was adopted to conduct four empirical studies. Our results suggest that: (1) employees generally see benefits in sharing leadership within the team through different leadership roles, and they consider it important to involve the formal leader throughout this process. However, employees also see challenges with respect to the different implementations that are useful to consider when adopting shared leadership. (2) high-quality peer leadership in different leadership roles is related to performance- and well-being outcomes and team identification mediates these relations. (3) there are 10 formal leadership roles and 10 peer leadership roles. While there is conceptual overlap in some of these roles for both parties, we also identify roles that are considered important to be explicitly fulfilled by either the formal leader or the peer leaders. (4) each of the peer leadership roles is related to positive organisational outcomes, with some of these relations being moderated by team-specific characteristics (e.g., team size).