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This paper aims to examine the influence of shared leadership on team performance in terms of quantity and quality and in addition the moderating effect of task complexity on this relationship.

Data was gathered from 26 teams of students from a major university in Germany who completed a laboratory team decision-making exercise.

The results suggest that teams sharing leadership showed better team performance and made fewer errors. They achieved higher levels of quality of performance. In addition, if the team members viewed the task as highly complex then the quality of their performance was increased.

Therefore for organizations to optimize team performance shared leadership should be promoted, the SNA should be used to develop interventions and training and influencing perceptions of task complexity should be considered as an important strategy to stimulate shared leadership in teams.

This paper has an original approach by testing for the first time how perceived task complexity moderates the relationship between shared leadership and team performance and by developing an original team task to investigate shared leadership.

Drawing on power approach-inhibition theory, this study develops a conditional indirect effect model to explore how team vertical leader position and expert power indirectly impact members’ shared leadership through vertical leader’s empowering behaviors.

Multi-source data was collected using a field survey research design. The final sample includes 944 employees in 164 teams from 14 companies in China.

This study found that the interaction of team vertical leader position power and expert power was positively related to their empowering behaviors, which in turn were positively associated with shared leadership. Moreover, our post hoc-analysis revealed the moderating effect of team power distance orientation on the relationship between vertical leader empowering behaviors and shared leadership.

This study sheds light on shared leadership literature by examining vertical leader position and expert power as antecedents. We also offer new directions for exploring how power functions by discussing leadership through the lens of power approach-inhibition theory.

Leadership is a crucial driver of project performance. While traditionally, the project leader was considered as the exclusive source of leadership behavior, recent research indicates that particularly dispersed projects may profit from joint leadership efforts by all project members. However, leadership functions in dispersed projects are likely to differ from those in a face-to-face context. In this chapter, we specify shared leadership functions for the domain of geographically dispersed project teams with high levels of task uncertainty. Arguing that shared leadership in dispersed teams occurs through interrelation of individual and team actions, we specify a dispersed screening function as well as self-, other-, and team-directed interrelation functions and develop propositions on how these functions are related to project performance. Furthermore, we point to motivational aspects of shared leadership and discuss the role of the vertical leader in developing and facilitating shared leadership.

It is suggested that, to be successful, innovation teams should be small and consist of people with key expertise who want to participate and develop new solutions within their organisations. When it comes to conducting innovation work, I suggest shared leadership may be a factor influencing success. In this chapter, a theoretical framework is presented on the shared leadership of innovation teams. The key to establishing shared leadership in innovation teams is to plan for it as the team is created, not after the team has already been formed, as this may result in various problems in the intended innovation project. The proposed framework details key aspects to consider; some of which are related to external factors such as management and resources, and some to internal factors such as the team’s size, competencies, and their ability to develop norms and ways of working together. The proposed framework is applicable for managers, innovation leaders, and team members, and contributes to previous research on shared leadership and innovation leadership. Further research on the proposed framework is suggested.

The team members’ expertise has been shown to increase team effectiveness when it is actively coordinated. While in face-to-face teams such expertise coordination unfolds through direct interaction, expertise coordination in dispersed teams is unlikely to evolve automatically. In this context, shared leadership, that is, the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members is argued to serve as initiating mechanism for expertise coordination.

This chapter is about how leaders attempt to move from traditional to shared leadership and why they often cannot. We develop a new theoretical framework to examine whether leaders are willing to shift control from themselves to their followers and thus promote shared leadership in their teams. We argue that control shifts, while necessary for shared leadership, are particularly difficult for leaders to enact. This is because leadership is often closely bound with power and status in the organization, a reality of organizational life that is often overlooked in the quest for new forms of leadership, such as shared leadership. Our contribution lies in examining leaders’ ability to enact shared leadership through the lenses of primary and secondary control, and situating control shift in the context of global leadership including selected cultural dimensions, complexity, and paradoxes.

This study aims to investigate the predictive role of team personality composition in facilitating shared leadership through team member exchange (TMX), while also to examine the moderating effect of organizational culture.

The authors conducted a two-stage online survey and selected the customer service teams, claims teams and financial teams of 26 Chinese insurance companies as the research samples. The authors finally obtained validated questionnaires from 107 teams with 457 members. The hypothesized relationships were tested using SPSS 25.0 and Mplus.

The results indicate that both team relationship-oriented and task-oriented personality composition have significant positive effects on shared leadership with team-member exchange serving as a full mediator for both paths. As a boundary condition, organizational culture (i.e. including internal integration values and external adaptation values) has a moderating effect on the influence of TMX on shared leadership.

The study investigates the predictive role of team personality composition on shared leadership, which complements the empirical studies of shared leadership antecedents in the literature. Drawing on social exchange perspective, the authors find out that TMX serves as a mediator between team personality composition and shared leadership. The authors also identify the moderating effect of organizational culture on the emergence of shared leadership. The research emphasizes the contextual boundary condition in this process.

Due to geographic dispersion and reliance on technology-mediated communication, developing collaborative capital can be a challenge in a virtual team. Knowledge sharing is one form of collaborative capital that has been identified as critical to virtual team success. This chapter develops a theoretical model that proposes that shared leadership in virtual teams is positively related to knowledge sharing between team members, and that this relationship will be partially mediated by trust. The model also shows that a team's degree of reliance on technology-mediated communication will moderate the relationships in the model.

Shared leadership is an effective mechanism for managing project teams. Its performance-enhancing benefits have been demonstrated in many studies. Nonetheless, there is an obvious silence about how to promote shared leadership in Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project teams. To address this deficit, the purposes of this study are to investigate the influence of shared leadership on LSS project success and to explore how team psychological safety, project task complexity and project task interdependence influence shared leadership.

A multi-source, time-lagged survey design with a four-month interval was conducted. To do this, the authors collected data from 71 project teams (comprising 71 project managers and 352 project members) using LSS approaches in the manufacturing and service industries.

The findings show that shared leadership positively influences LSS project success. The authors also found that team psychological safety fosters the development of shared leadership and, more importantly, these effects are stronger when the tasks are more complex and more interdependent.

These findings advance our understanding of the factors that enable shared leadership and equip LSS project managers with practical techniques to improve shared leadership for the success of their projects.

This study extends the theory of shared leadership to the context of LSS project management and is among the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to theoretically propose and empirically validate how to promote shared leadership in LSS project teams.

Due to the proliferation of measures (and conceptualisations) employed to assess shared leadership behaviours, it is unclear to researchers and practitioners which specific team behaviours should be encouraged and which measures should be included in research to enhance team effectiveness outcomes. To address this issue, this research tests 11 shared leadership scales to identify which measures and behaviours exhibit the strongest relationship with team effectiveness.

This research utilises survey methods (n = 328) to test the measurement of shared leadership using 11 previously validated scales. This novel approach uses structural equation modelling techniques (SEM) to compare and contrast multiple measures targeting a single underlying construct.

Across the 11 measures tested (drawn from three theoretical perspectives), no single scale demonstrated a superior ability to assess shared leadership (based on model-fit and effect size exhibited). Nevertheless, the results indicated that measures assessing shared transformational leadership were most highly related to team effectiveness; whilst the shared leadership density measure (using social network techniques) exhibited the weakest relationship.

Limitations of this research include the use of a student sample (although participants were screened based on their current employment in a team environment), and the individual assessment of shared leadership rather than team assessment. These findings indicate that shared transformational leadership behaviours are highly related to perceptions of team effectiveness. It is recommended future research define and delineate between constructs of interest, including general forms shared leadership (i.e. shared leadership broadly defined) and more specific forms of shared leadership (e.g. shared transformational leadership [narrowly defined]).

It is recommended that interventions and/or training designed to enhance team shared leadership outcomes should specifically target shared transformational leadership behaviours; especially when aiming to increase beneficial team outcomes such as effectiveness or potency.

This research is novel in both advancing our understanding of the shared leadership behaviours needed to enhance team effectiveness; and in methodological approaches comparing and contrasting multiple measures of a single latent construct.