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Shared Leadership in Teams: An Investigation of Antecedent Conditions and Performance

October 2007
Academy of Management Journal 50(5):1217-1234

DOI:10.2307/20159921

Authors:

Jay B. Carson

Southern Methodist University

Paul E Tesluk

University at Buffalo, State University of New York

Shared leadership refers to a team property whereby leadership is distributed among team members rather than focused on a single designated leader. We examined antecedent conditions that lead to the development of shared leadership and the influence of shared leadership on team performance in a sample of 59 consulting teams. Both the internal team environment, consisting of shared purpose, social support, and voice, and external coaching were important predictors of shared leadership emergence. In turn, shared leadership was found to predict team performance as rated by clients. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for team leadership and effectiveness.

The Moderating Effect of Coaching on the Relationship Between Internal Team Environment and Shared Leadership

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Results of Regression Analyses

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Content uploaded by Paul E Tesluk

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Running Head: SHARED LEADERSHIP

SHARED LEADERSHIP IN TEAMS:

AN INVESTIGATION OF ANTECEDENT CONDITIONS AND PERFORMANCE

JAY B. CARSON

Southern Methodist University

Cox School of Business

Department of Management and Organizations

6212 Bishop Blvd.

Dallas, TX 75275-0333

Tel: (214) 768-1213

Fax: (214) 768-4099

E-mail: jcarson@cox.smu.edu

PAUL E. TESLUK

University of Maryland

Robert H. Smith School of Business

Department of Management and Organization

Van Munching Hall

College Park, MD

Tel: (301) 405-4968

Fax: (301) 314-8787

E-mail: ptesluk@rhsmith.umd.edu

JENNIFER A. MARRONE

Seattle University

Albers School of Business and Economics

Department of Management

401 Pigott Building

Seattle, WA

Tel: (206) 296-5726

E-mail: marronej@seattleu.edu

In press: AMJ

Acknowledgment: We would like to thank Hank Sims, Lisa Dragoni, and Holly Slay, as

well as Brad Kirkman and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on

earlier versions of this paper.

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Shared Leadership in Teams:

An Investigation of Antecedent Conditions and Performance

ABSTRACT

Shared leadership refers to a phenomenon where leadership is distributed throughout the

team rather than relying on a single, designated leader. We examined antecedent conditions that

lead to the development of shared leadership and the influence of shared leadership on team

performance in a sample of 59 consulting teams. Both the internal team environment, consisting

of shared purpose, social support, and voice, and external coaching were important predictors of

shared leadership emergence. In turn, shared leadership was found to predict team performance

as rated by clients. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for team

leadership and effectiveness.

Shared Leadership 3

Leadership is considered crucial for enabling team effectiveness (Cohen & Bailey, 1997;

Hackman & Walton, 1986; Kozlowski, Gully, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 1996), and some

researchers have even argued that it is the most critical ingredient (Sinclair, 1992; Zaccaro,

Rittman, & Marks, 2001). However, most existing research on team leadership has focused

narrowly on an individual team leader’s influence (usually a manager external to the team) while

largely neglecting leadership provided by team members (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; Stewart &

Manz, 1995). Several trends in team design, use, and structure, however, point to the importance

of internal team leadership. First, the complexity and ambiguity that teams often experience

make it unlikely that a single external leader can successfully perform all necessary leadership

functions (Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2004). Second, current forms of teamwork that emphasize

knowledge-based work rely on employees who have high levels of expertise and seek autonomy

in how they apply their knowledge and skills (DeNisi, Hitt, & Jackson, 2003), therefore desiring

greater opportunity to shape and participate in the leadership functions for their teams. Further,

flatter organizational structures and the pervasive presence of self-managing teams, which are

now well established and deeply rooted in U.S. industry (Lawler, Mohrman, & Benson, 2001;

Manz & Sims, 1987), emphasize the need for leadership originating from within the team as

opposed to a single individual in a position of hierarchy. Despite this transition in leadership

responsibilities from formal managers to team members, relatively little research has addressed

the implications of this evolutionary shift to internally distributed forms of team leadership.

Early leadership scholars argued for the importance of leadership being shared among

team members (Gibb, 1954; Katz & Kahn, 1978). Gibb (1954: 884) first suggested, “Leadership

is probably best conceived as a group quality, as a set of functions which must be carried out by

the group. This concept of ‘distributed leadership’ is an important one.” Katz and Kahn (1978)

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also suggested that when team members voluntarily and spontaneously offer their influence to

others in support of shared goals, shared leadership can provide organizations with competitive

advantage through greater levels of commitment, more personal and organizational resources

brought to bear on complex tasks, more openness to reciprocal influence from others, and greater

sharing of information. Consequently, they argued, “those organizations in which influential acts

are widely shared are most effective” (Katz & Kahn, 1978: 332). These early perspectives

challenged the convention that leadership is solely an individual phenomenon, but there has been

little empirical work on shared forms of leadership until recently.

We define shared leadership as an emergent team property that results from the

distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members. It represents a condition of

mutual influence embedded in the interactions between team members that can significantly

improve team and organizational performance (Day et al., 2004). Shared leadership contrasts

with the conventional paradigm (referred to as “vertical leadership” by Pearce and Sims (2002)),

which emphasizes the role of the manager who is positioned hierarchically above and external to

the team, has formal authority over the team, and is responsible for the team’s processes and

outcomes (e.g., Druskat & Wheeler, 2003; Hackman & Walton, 1986; Kozlowski et al., 1996).

Recent empirical work has demonstrated links between shared leadership and team performance

(e.g., Avolio, Jung, Sivasubramaniam, 1996; Ensley, Hmieleski, & Pearce, 2006; Pearce & Sims,

2002; Sivasubramaniam, Murry, Avolio, & Jung, 2002). While these studies have helped

advance the concept of shared leadership, several research gaps remain which have motivated

this study.

The first purpose of our study is to begin to theoretically identify and test conditions that

support shared leadership in work teams. To our knowledge, there have been no studies directly

Shared Leadership 5

exploring the conditions that give rise to shared leadership. Reflecting a perspective of leadership

in teams as a dynamic process involving interactions between team members and external team

leaders (cf., Kozlowski et al., 1996; Zaccaro & Klimoski, 2002), we consider conditions both

internal and external to the team. Two proximal factors that are likely to influence the

development of shared leadership are the internal team environment, including a shared purpose,

social support, and voice, and the level of external coaching support. Considering these

antecedent conditions for shared leadership also adds to the scant literature on interactions

between external and internal team leadership, which is important since both forms of leadership

operate concurrently and in conjunction with one another (e.g., Manz & Sims, 1987).

A second purpose is to provide an improved conceptualization and operationalization of

the shared leadership construct that reflects its theoretical complexity. Scholars have called for

more attention to theoretical models of team leadership that are developed at the team level

rather than mere extrapolations of existing dyadic leadership approaches (Kozlowski & Bell,

2003). Prior work on shared leadership has relied primarily on aggregating team members’

assessments of the degree to which leadership responsibilities are shared or certain behaviors are

exhibited within the team (see Table 1), which may fail to capture the relational nature of the

patterns of shared influence in teams. Utilizing social network theory (e.g., Brass, 1995; Mehra,

Smith, Dixon, & Robertson, 2006), we attempt to advance a more complete conceptualization of

the emergent and relational nature of shared leadership and take a social network measurement

approach in order to better capture these overall patterns of influence.

A third purpose of this study is to predict performance outcomes. Existing research on

shared leadership has almost exclusively relied on team members’ and/or external leaders’

ratings of performance (see Table 1), which raises concerns about common method variance as

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well as the ability to obtain an independent assessment of the team’s performance. We study the

performance outcomes of shared leadership using a source independent of the team and its

immediate leadership structure, i.e., the end users of the team’s work product. We conclude with

implications for team leadership research and improved teamwork practices in organizations.

---------------------------------

Insert Table 1 about here

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LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES

Shared Leadership Defined

Gibb (1954) first suggested the idea of two forms of team leadership: distributed and

focused. Focused leadership occurs when leadership resides within a single individual, whereas

distributed leadership occurs when two or more individuals share the roles, responsibilities, and

functions of leadership. Rather than rigid either-or categories, Gronn (2002) argued that these

two concepts of focused and distributed leadership be considered endpoints on a continuum.

To further develop the concept of how leadership is shared among team members, we

utilize Yukl’s (1989: 5) definition of leadership as “influence processes involving determination

of the group’s or organization’s objectives, motivating task behavior in pursuit of these

objectives, and influencing group maintenance and culture.” Building on the concept of

leadership as influence and drawing on multilevel theory (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000; Morgeson

& Hofmann, 1999), we define shared leadership as an emergent team property that results from

the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members. Consistent with the notion

of collective constructs (Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999), we argue that shared leadership

originates with individual team members engaging in activities that influence the team and other

team members in areas related to direction, motivation, and support (Yukl, 1989) and through the

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series of interactions that team members have with each other involving the negotiation and

sharing of leadership responsibilities. The resulting collective structure can be considered to be a

leadership network that influences and shapes both team and individual activities and outcomes.

Leadership can be conceptualized in relation to either the strength (i.e., quality or

effectiveness of influence provided) or the source of influence (i.e., single vs. multiple team

members providing influence.) Our definition is focused on multiple sources of influence, and

refers to widespread influence within teams rather than to specific leadership behaviors, formal

positions, specific types of influence, or the effectiveness of the leadership that is exhibited by

these sources. Building on these ideas of distributed influence and drawing upon Gibb’s (1954)

original conceptualization, we believe shared leadership can be conceptualized along a

continuum based on the number of leadership sources (i.e., team members) garnering a high

degree of influence within the team. Anchoring the low end of the continuum are cases where

team members follow the leadership of a single individual. Although the nature of leadership

exhibited by this single individual might be quite strong, leadership here originates from only a

single source. In contrast, at the high end of the shared leadership continuum are teams where

most, if not all, team members provide influence to one another. Here, the source of leadership

influence is distributed among team members rather than concentrated or focused in a single

individual. In these teams, team members both lead and follow one another, such that at a given

point in time members are both providing leadership for certain aspects of team functioning and

also responding to the leadership provided by others on the team in different areas. Teams with

high levels of shared leadership may also shift and/or rotate leadership across time, such that

different members provide leadership at different points in the team’s lifecycle and development.

Shared Leadership 8

Shared leadership is a relational1 phenomenon involving mutual influence between team

members as they work toward the pursuit of team objectives, and social network theory provides

a natural theoretical and analytical approach to studying the relational influence structure in

teams (Mehra et al., 2006). The exercise of leadership influence (Yukl, 1989) occurs in the

context of team member relationships, and assumes the existence of followers or “influencees”

(Bedeian & Hunt, 2006). Shared leadership creates patterns of reciprocal influence which further

develop and reinforce existing relationships among team members. Thus, social network theory

is appropriate as it examines patterns of relationships among individuals such as advice,

information, and friendship networks, and emphasizes the relationship as the unit of analysis

(Brass, 1995; Sparrowe, Liden, Wayne, & Kraimer, 2001). Further, social network analysis

allows for the study of multiple sources of leadership influence, and the ability to model patterns

of influence within the team and preserve rich data about the actual distribution of influence

(Mehra et al., 2006).

Consistent with social network theory, we argue that the pattern of emerging mutual

influence in teams can be conceptualized as an increase in the density of the team’s internal

leadership network. A leadership network is the pattern of individuals who rely on others for

leadership of the team, and density increases as this reliance on one another for leadership grows.

Density, as used conceptually in social network research, is a structural property representing the

pattern of relationships within teams, and describes the overall level of different types of

exchanges among members of a given social network (Sparrowe et al., 2001). Sparrowe and

colleagues (2001: 317) describe this team level construct as follows: “Density is analogous to the

1 When we use the terms ‘relational’ and ‘relationships’ here, we are simply referring to the interactions between

two or more people. These terms are not meant to imply that shared leadership assumes the existence of or is the

result of close personal friendships among team members. We thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting the

need to make this distinction.

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mean number of ties per group member. The more ties each group member enjoys with the other

group members, the greater the density of the network.” Here, ties between team members (also

referred to as relationships) exist when a team member perceives another as exerting leadership

influence within the team. Thus, the density of a leadership network is the mean number of

relationships (per team member) involving leadership influence. When more team members

provide leadership to their peers, density of this type of network increases. Operationally,

network density is a measure of the proportion of total possible relationships (actual versus

potential) that exists in a given network (Wasserman & Faust, 1994), and thus captures variance

in the overall patterns of relationships rather than variance in shared perceptions of a construct

(as is the case with aggregated behavioral scales). Accordingly, utilizing network density as a

measure of shared leadership appropriately reflects the extent to which leadership influence is

distributed among a relatively high or relatively low proportion of its team members.

Relationship With Similar Constructs

Having defined and described the nature of shared leadership, it is also helpful to

describe briefly its relationship to other similar constructs, such as autonomous or self-managing

teams, team empowerment, cooperation, team cognition (e.g., transactive memory systems and

team mental models), and emergent leadership. Self-managing and autonomous teams describe

particular types of team designs whereby team members have greater degrees of responsibility

for setting their own goals, monitoring their own progress, and making their own decisions than

do team members in manager-led teams (Hackman, 1987). Although self-managing team designs

may promote the development of shared leadership through increased self-management (Manz &

Sims, 1987), or through heightened levels of trust or autonomy (Langfred, 2004), such designs

themselves do not necessarily result in leadership influence being widely distributed within the

Shared Leadership 10

team as other factors such as the internal team environment and external coaching may also

influence shared leadership (Wageman, 2001).

Team empowerment is a motivational construct and has been defined as the collective

experience of heightened levels of task motivation due to team members’ assessments of their

team’s tasks as providing them with high levels of meaningfulness, autonomy, sense of impact,

and potency (Kirkman & Rosen, 1997). From a temporally dynamic perspective, team

empowerment can be viewed as an emergent state that both precedes and follows team processes

depending on the stage of a team’s development and performance cycle (cf., Marks, Mathieu, &

Zaccaro, 2001). From this perspective, team empowerment might facilitate the development of

shared leadership by motivating team members to exercise influence. Conversely, shared

leadership might also lead to greater team empowerment by providing members with a

heightened sense of meaningfulness, autonomy, impact, and potency, depending on the stage of a

team’s development. However, a team may experience a high level of empowerment yet still

have a strong external leader providing most of the leadership influence for the team, with very

little shared leadership exhibited by team members.

Shared leadership is related to but distinct from other team processes such as cooperation

or helping, which refer to working with and/or assisting other team members with their tasks

(Kozlowski & Bell, 2003). While these types of behavior relate to being an effective team

member and promote efficiency, they do not involve the active influence that is essential to

leadership. Consistent with this conceptualization, a recent study found only a moderate

correlation between shared leadership and cooperation or helping (Ziegert, 2005).

Shared leadership is also distinct from team cognition constructs, such as transactive

memory systems (TMSs), or structures through which members can collectively encode, store,

Shared Leadership 11

and retrieve information and expertise (Wegner, 1987), and team mental models (TMMs), or

shared understandings about attributes of the team or the task at hand (Cannon-Bowers, Salas, &

Converse, 1993). Conceptually, the primary distinction between shared leadership and these

team knowledge structures is that the former concerns collective influence, whereas the latter

concerns collective cognition. This conceptual difference may perhaps best be seen in the

distinction between measurement approaches. Shared leadership assesses the distribution of

leadership among team members. TMS measures capture team-level systems for utilizing and

integrating individually and collectively held expertise (Lewis, 2003). TMMs assess the

similarity and accuracy of individual mental models within a team (Marks, Zaccaro, & Mathieu,

2000). Although distinct concepts, shared leadership likely facilitates the development of TMMs

and TMSs through continual influence-based interactions and social exchanges (Klimoski &

Mohammed, 1994) that occur as team members share leadership responsibilities. Reciprocally,

through effective coordination of expertise and the development of mutual understandings, TMS

and TMM likely enable the emergence of shared leadership.

Finally, emergent leadership refers to group members who exert significant influence

over other members of the group although no formal authority has been vested in them (Schneier

& Goktepe, 1983). Shared leadership is consistent with some of the early group research by

Bales (1953), who found that two informal leaders often tend to emerge in leaderless groups: one

focused on the task, and one concentrating on relational issues. This literature is similar to shared

leadership in that it typically concerns whether leadership is provided informally by a group

member (known as an ‘emergent leader’) in addition to or instead of a formally appointed leader

(e.g., Wheelan & Johnston, 1996). However, emergent leadership research differs by focusing

on the characteristics of the individual and the group that predict informal leadership emergence,

Shared Leadership 12

as well as narrowly considering only 1 or 2 persons as emergent leaders and ignoring the

leadership influence of others. In sum, shared leadership is distinct from emergent leadership in

that the former can take place in a team with or without a designated leader, can be either formal

or informal, and considers the distribution and sharing of leadership among all team members in

contrast to a restriction to only one or two leaders.

Antecedent Conditions: Internal and External

Researchers studying shared leadership have argued that in order for shared leadership to

emerge, two sets of activities must occur (Katz & Kahn, 1978). First, team members must offer

leadership and seek to influence the direction, motivation, and support of the group. Second, the

team as a whole must be willing to rely on leadership by multiple team members. In order for

these individual and collective behaviors to occur, team members must believe that offering and

accepting influence to and from fellow team members is welcome and constructive. We

considered key factors - both internal and external - that are likely to impact the development of

shared leadership in teams through these mechanisms. The first condition is an internal team

environment that supports the development of shared leadership over time, and the second is the

level of supportive coaching provided by an external leader.

We propose first that shared leadership is facilitated by an overall team environment that

consists of three dimensions – shared purpose, social support, and voice. These dimensions have

been drawn from a review of literature on shared leadership (e.g., Avolio et al., 1996; Barry,

1991; Pearce & Conger, 2003; Seers, 1996; Yukl, 1989), and represent distinct concepts that are

also highly interrelated and mutually reinforcing, thereby representing a higher-order construct

(cf., Edwards, 2001; Law, Wong, & Mobley, 1998). We refer to them here, collectively, as an

internal team environment enabling shared leadership because they work together to produce the

Shared Leadership 13

kind of team context that encourages the willingness to both offer leadership influence and rely

on the leadership of other team members (Katz & Kahn, 1978).

Shared purpose is the first dimension of an internal team environment enabling shared

leadership. Shared purpose exists when team members have a similar understanding of the

team’s primary objectives and take steps to ensure a focus on collective goals. Prior work has

theorized and demonstrated that team members who have a common sense of purpose and agreed

upon goals are more likely to feel motivated, empowered and committed to their team and work

(Kirkman & Rosen, 1999; O' Leary-Kelly, Martocchio, & Frink, 1994; Liden et al., 2000). These

heightened levels of motivation, empowerment, and commitment that individuals experience

when the team possesses a shared purpose increase the willingness of team members to share the

team’s leadership responsibilities (Avolio et al., 1996). In addition, with a commonly understood

set of objectives and direction, team members will be more likely to establish goals and take

actions that support the activities of other team members, thereby facilitating both goal-oriented

and work-directive leadership behaviors by team members (Seers, 1996), as well as a collective

direction to team activities (Yukl, 1989).

The second dimension of an internal team environment that supports shared leadership is

social support, which is defined as team members’ efforts to provide emotional and

psychological strength to one another. Team members support one another through encouraging

and recognizing individual and team contributions and accomplishments (Marks et al., 2001).

This helps to create an environment where team members feel that their input is valued and

appreciated. By actively participating in the team and feeling supported team members are more

likely to work cooperatively and develop a sense of shared responsibility for team outcomes

(Kirkman & Rosen, 1999). Social support is associated with group maintenance and culture

Shared Leadership 14

(Yukl, 1989), leader support/supportive behaviors (Seers, 1996), relational leadership (Barnard,

1938), and developing and maintaining the team by providing “interpersonal glue” that helps

build a strong internal social network within the team (Barry, 1991).

The third dimension of this internal team environment is voice. There is not a standard

definition of voice in the literature, as it has been used in a variety of research areas to describe

constructive change-oriented communication, participation in decision making, involvement,

certain extra-role work behaviors, due process, and employee grievance procedures (Van Dyne

& LePine, 1998); however, at its core it connotes participation and input. We define it here as the

degree to which team members have participation and input into how the team carries out its

purpose. Voice is associated with interaction facilitation/participative behaviors in teams (Seers,

1996), and these types of behaviors can result in higher levels of social influence among team

members through increased engagement and involvement. In addition, voice has been associated

with participation in decision making and constructive discussion and debate around alternative

approaches to team goals, tasks and procedures (De Dreu & West, 2001; Simons, Pelled, &

Smith, 1999), which can improve the amount of collective influence, involvement, and

commitment relative to important team decisions. Thus, the presence of high levels of voice in a

team should create an environment where people engage in mutual leadership by being

committed to and becoming proactively involved in helping the team achieve its goals and

objectives and constructively challenging each other in pursuit of group goals.

These three dimensions are mutually reinforcing and complementary. When team

members are able to speak up and get involved (voice), the likelihood that many of them will

exercise leadership increases greatly. The opportunity for voice also facilitates shared leadership

by strengthening both a common sense of direction and the potential for positive interpersonal

Shared Leadership 15

support within the team. When teams are focused on collective goals (shared purpose), there is a

greater sense of meaning and increased motivation for team members to both speak up and invest

themselves in providing leadership to the team and to respond to the leadership of others. The

motivation to participate and provide input towards common goals and purpose can also be

reinforced by an encouraging and supportive climate. When team members feel recognized and

supported within the team (social support) they are more willing to share responsibility,

cooperate, and commit to the team’s collective goals. Thus, these three dimensions work together

to create an internal team environment that is characterized by a shared understanding about

purpose and goals, a sense of recognition and importance, and high levels of involvement,

challenge, and cooperation. Therefore, we predict:

Hypothesis 1. An internal team environment consisting of shared purpose, social support,

and voice will be positively related to the level of shared leadership within the team.

External Team Coaching

Scholars studying shared leadership and leadership in self-managing teams have noted

the critical role of external team leaders in the development of team members’ motivation and

capabilities to lead themselves and become self-directed (Kozlowski et al., 1996; Manz & Sims,

1987). When discussing this role, researchers frequently stress the importance of coaching

behaviors, which Hackman and Wageman define as external team leaders’ “…direct interaction

with a team intended to help team members make coordinated and task-appropriate use of their

collective resources in accomplishing the team’s task”(2005: 269). Researchers have identified

different types of team coaching, distinguishing between forms that are more supportive and

reinforcing of the team’s self-leadership as compared to those that focus on identifying team

problems and engaging in active task interventions which interfere with the team’s autonomy

Shared Leadership 16

and self-management (Morgeson, 2005; Wageman, 2001). Here, we specifically refer to the

former, which has been called “supportive coaching” (Morgeson, 2005) because it is more

closely connected with the development of team self-management, initiative, and autonomy,

whereas active coaching is more likely to undermine these team characteristics and possibly

inhibit the development of shared leadership. Supportive coaching can also be distinguished

from other external team leadership functions such as designing the team and its task (Wageman,

2001) and facilitating boundary management (Druskat & Wheeler, 2003).

Through supportive coaching external team managers can contribute to the development

of shared leadership in a variety of ways. First, by engaging in behaviors such as encouraging,

reinforcing, and rewarding instances where team members demonstrate leadership, supportive

coaching fosters among team members a sense of self-competence and team independence

(Manz & Sims, 1987). When team members believe that they have significant autonomy and are

confident in their skills to self-manage the work of their team they should be more likely to

demonstrate leadership. Supporting this assertion, supportive coaching by a team manager has

been found to be positively associated with the degree to which team members demonstrate self-

management (Wageman, 2001). Second, by providing their teams with encouragement and

support, external coaching can help build a shared commitment to the team and its objectives

which can reduce free riding behavior and increase the likelihood that team members will

demonstrate personal initiative (Hackman & Wageman, 2005). Third, by giving their teams

suggestions about appropriate task strategies that will ensure that their activities are well aligned

with work requirements and demands (Hackman & Wageman, 2005), team members will have

greater clarity on how to best manage their work and processes and thereby be more likely to

Shared Leadership 17

influence each other because this understanding will be shared across team members (Kozlowski

et al., 1996). Therefore, we predict:

Hypothesis 2. External team coaching will be positively related to the level of shared

leadership within the team.

The second – and more indirect – way in which external coaching may influence shared

leadership is based on a functional approach to team leadership which states that the role of the

external team leader is to do whatever is not being adequately managed by the team itself

(Hackman & Walton, 1986). When teams have a supportive internal environment, team coaching

by an external team leader is likely to be largely redundant with this internal environment and

therefore less critical to the emergence of shared leadership among team members. However, for

teams that lack a strong shared purpose, do not promote full engagement and participation, and

where team members are unable to provide each other with social support, a functional

leadership perspective suggests that the external leader’s coaching may be particularly important

in helping teams overcome these liabilities and facilitate the development of shared internal

leadership. Specifically, effective team coaching by an external leader - focused on building

collective commitment to the team and its work, assisting the team with aligning their activities

with task requirements, and fostering independence - can help provide the motivational and

consultative functions (Hackman & Wageman, 2005) that enable shared leadership but have not

been adequately developed by the team internally. External team leaders can also help team

members understand the different skills and capabilities of team members and how they can be

integrated to address the demands of the task. This understanding can motivate individual team

members to initiate and engage in internal leadership activities and do so in a coordinated

fashion resulting in an emergent pattern of shared leadership. In this fashion, an external team

Shared Leadership 18

leader through supportive coaching can provide the means by which shared leadership may

emerge when a team has yet to develop a high level of social support, shared purpose, and voice.

Based on the foregoing nature of the relationships between the internal team environment and an

external leader’s team coaching, we therefore make the following prediction:

Hypothesis 3. Team coaching by an external leader interacts with the internal team

environment in predicting shared leadership such that coaching will be found to be more

strongly related to shared leadership when the internal team environment is unsupportive.

Shared Leadership and Team Performance

Shared leadership represents an important intangible resource available to teams, and

therefore should enhance team performance on complex tasks (Day et al., 2004). When team

members offer their leadership to others and to the mission or purpose, they should experience

higher levels of commitment, bring greater personal and organizational resources to bear on

complex tasks, and share greater amounts of information (Katz & Kahn, 1978). When they are

also open to influence from fellow team members, the team can function with respect and trust

and develop shared leadership that in turn becomes an additional resource for improving team

process and performance (Day et al., 2004; Marks et al., 2001). This intangible resource is

derived from the network relationships within the team, and results in greater effort,

coordination, and efficiency for the team (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998).

Only a handful of empirical studies have been conducted with shared leadership as an

explicit source of leadership, but the results are promising (see Table 1). Avolio and colleagues

(1996) explored shared leadership among teams of undergraduate students and found a positive

correlation with self-reported effectiveness. Pearce and Sims (2002) studied the relationship

between shared leadership and change management team effectiveness at a large automotive

Shared Leadership 19

manufacturing firm and found shared leadership to be a more useful predictor than the vertical

leadership of the appointed team leader. Sivasubramaniam and colleagues (2002) found that

team leadership, defined in a manner similar to shared leadership as collective influence of

members in a team on each other, was positively related to both team performance and potency

over time in a sample of undergraduate business students. Pearce, Yoo, and Alavi (2004) studied

shared leadership in virtual teams engaged in social work projects and again found that shared

leadership was a stronger predictor of team performance than vertical leadership. Ensley,

Hmielski, and Pearce (2006) also found shared leadership to be a stronger predictor than vertical

leadership of new venture performance in a sample of top management teams.

Finally, there is also indirect support for shared leadership predicting team performance.

Taggar, Hackett, and Saha (1999) examined emergent leadership within teams and found that

team performance was greatest when other team members, in addition to the emergent leader,

demonstrated high levels of leadership influence. Failure of even a single member to exhibit

leadership behavior was found to be detrimental to team performance. Although shared

leadership was not formally defined or measured, these findings appear to support the notion that

shared leadership might result in greater effectiveness than the emergence of a single internal

team leader. Taken as a whole, these studies suggest that shared leadership is an important

predictor of team performance, and provides an additional resource to teams beyond the

leadership of any single individual. Therefore, we predict:

Hypothesis 4. The degree of shared leadership in a team will be positively related to team

performance.

METHODS

Shared Leadership 20

Sample

Participants and procedure. The study sample included 59 MBA student-consulting

teams from a large eastern university (total N = 348; team size ranged from 4 - 7 members with a

mean team size = 5.93 individuals). The sample was 67% male, and ages ranged from 24 to 42

(mean age = 29 years old). Participants were 56% White, 33% Asian, 5% Black, and 5%

Hispanic. This sample is well suited to testing our hypotheses because the nature of the team task

was highly similar and the team life cycle was identical across the teams, thus ruling out these

mitigating factors often present in empirical team research. Teams were engaged in real

consulting projects and worked closely with their clients over a 5-month period that concluded

with a significant deliverable (presentation to the client and an accompanying report). Thus, the

likelihood that findings are generalizable to non-student populations is strengthened.

Students were assigned to their teams by the program office, and project teams were

multifunctional in terms of team members’ areas of concentration and expertise. Each team

worked on a current problem or business need for an existing firm and was assigned a faculty

advisor who served as an external leader, and who also assigned grades. These external team

leaders acted much like a partner in a consulting firm who supervises multiple projects; they

were available to provide general guidance and support for the team in working with the client

throughout the course of the project. Teams did not have a formally appointed internal leader.

Data from teams were collected through surveys which were administered approximately

two-thirds of the way through the project, and data from clients and faculty advisors were

collected through surveys administered after the projects and final deliverables were complete

and presented to the clients. We surveyed clients in order to obtain independent sources of team

performance while faculty surveys were administered primarily to gather information on the

Shared Leadership 21

level of project demands faced by the team. Surveys were received from 348 team members

(response rate = 100%), from faculty advisors for 51 of the teams (response rate = 86%), and

from client contacts for 56 of the teams (response rate = 95%).

Measures

Team performance. Client contacts that had worked closely with the team and were the

end users of the project results were asked to rate the effectiveness of each team in terms of

project deliverables, presentation, and helpfulness of recommendations. Sample items began

with the stem “How effective was this team in…” and include: “meeting your expectations in

terms of the quality of the final deliverables,” “providing a quality presentation of the final

deliverables,” and “overall, meeting your needs and goals for this project.” Seven items were

rated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (extremely ineffective) to 7 (extremely effective),

and principal-components analysis yielded a single factor (α = .93).

Shared leadership. Shared leadership was measured following a social network approach

(Mayo, Meindl, & Pastor, 2003) by using density, which is a measure of the total amount of

leadership displayed by team members as perceived by others within the team (mean = 3.16,

median = 3.15, and range = 2.40 – 3.90). Every team member rated each of his/her peers (using a

5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Not at all) to 5 (To a very great extent)) on the following

question: “To what degree does your team rely on this individual for leadership?” To calculate

density, we followed the measurement approach for valued relations set forth by Sparrowe and

colleagues (2001) by summing all values (here, the team member ratings of each other’s

leadership) and then dividing that sum by the total possible ties, or relationships, among team

members. Thus, following our definition of shared leadership as a team property reflecting the

distribution of leadership among multiple team members, teams in which many team members

Shared Leadership 22

are rating many of their peers as leaders will appropriately yield higher density scores than those

teams in which only 1 or a few members are perceived as exerting leadership within the team.

Agreement across the respondents’ ratings of their team members was assessed and

demonstrated adequate interrater reliability (Median rwg = .65, ICC(1) = .34, and ICC(2) = .78).

In order to illustrate the density measure visually, we created leadership sociograms for

each team (Mayo et al., 2003). Leadership network ratings were first dichotomized: values of 4

(great extent) or 5 (very great extent) were assigned a value of 1, and values of 3 or less were

assigned 0.2 The sociograms for the lowest, median, and highest scoring teams on the shared

leadership measure are presented below in Figure 1. The circles are nodes representing team

members. Arrows represent leadership relations: An arrow pointing from one member (A) to

another (B) means that member B is perceived as a source of leadership by member A. Two-

headed arrows mean that individuals both perceive one another as a source of leadership.

---------------------------------

Insert Figure 1 about here

---------------------------------

Internal team environment. Members rated their team’s internal environment using 10

items (5-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree)) consisting of three

separate theoretically derived subscales: shared purpose, social support, and voice. Voice was

measured using 4 items based on previous work by LePine and VanDyne (1998) and DeDreu

and West (2001), while shared purpose and social support scales were developed to specifically

fit the context of our sample. All items are listed in Appendix A. To test for discriminant

validity, we performed a confirmatory factor analysis (using EQS) specifying a higher-order

factor with three dimensions (indicated by the 10 items), which yielded a good fit to the data

2 It is important to note that the dichotomous (0, 1) data set was used only for the purpose of creating these graphic

depictions of the leadership relations within the team. All substantive analyses in the paper used the fully-valued

ratings (1 – 5) for calculation of the density score which was our measure of shared leadership.

Shared Leadership 23

(χ2(32)= 67.87; AIC = 3.87; CFI = .977; GFI = .963; AGFI = .937; SRMR = .036; RMSEA =

.057), thus demonstrating support for the hypothesized structure3. To investigate the convergent

validity of the structure for internal team environment, we examined the correlations among the

three subscales. The zero-order correlations were high, ranging from .72 to .80 (p < .001), which

provided evidence that the three subscales represent dimensions that are highly interrelated.

Given the overall support for the hypothesized model, these three subscales were first aggregated

to the team level and then averaged together to produce a single variable that represents internal

team environment (α = .94). We tested for whether aggregation was appropriate using the rwg

statistic of within-team agreement (James, Demaree, & Wolf, 1993) and intraclass correlation

coefficients (ICC(1) and ICC(2)) to assess the extent to which team responses differed among

teams and the reliability of the team level means (Bliese, 2000). The mean rwg = .96, indicating a

high level of agreement across members within teams in rating their internal team environment,

ICC(1) = .14, demonstrating that significant variance is accounted for by team membership, and

ICC(2) = .71, suggesting that the team-level means are reliable.

Coaching. Team members were asked to rate the level of supportive coaching

(Morgeson, 2005) provided by their external leader (faculty advisor) using a 3-item scale. Items

included: “expresses his/her confidence in the capabilities of our team,” “effectively motivates

and guides our team toward accomplishing challenging goals for this project,” and “is sensitive

to the needs of our team and tries to help us however he/she can.” These items capture the

motivational and consultative functions of external leaders that have been suggested as

particularly important for fostering both commitment to the team and independence (Hackman &

Wageman, 2005; Morgeson, 2005). Items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1

3 We also examined the fit statistics for a 1-factor model, which was not a very good fit to the data. A chi-square

difference test also indicated that our theoretical model was a significantly better fit.

Shared Leadership 24

(strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) (α = .92), and responses were aggregated to the team

level and demonstrated strong levels of within-team agreement, between-team differences, and

reliable team-level means (mean rwg = .83; ICC(1) = .51; ICC(2) = .80).

Control variables. Controls were included for the effects of team size, project demands,

gender diversity, and race diversity in order to address these possible alternate explanations for

shared leadership and team performance. Differences in team size may influence resources and

workload requirements that may influence team performance and therefore was included as a

control variable (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999). Environmental factors can impact team outcomes

(e.g., Tesluk & Mathieu, 1999) and more demanding projects may thus have a detrimental

impact on shared leadership and team performance. Previous research has also shown significant

effects for demographic heterogeneity on team outcomes (Williams & O'Reilly, 1998), and

therefore, was also included as a control. Team size was measured as the actual number of team

members on each consulting team. Project demands was measured by a 7-item Likert scale that

captures faculty advisor ratings of the degree to which the team had to manage difficult project

challenges. Sample items include: “changing client demands during the course of the project,”

“difficulties in accessing data or information necessary for completing the work,” and “problems

or changes in the project timeline that were outside the team’s direct control.” Items were rated

on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all present) to 7 (very much present) (α = .75).

Gender diversity and race diversity were measured using Teachman’s index4 which captures

how team members are distributed among the possible categories of a variable (Teachman,

1980).

4 While the current tendency is to use Blau’s index for diversity, the only difference between Blau and Teachman is

standardization, and there is no conceptual or empirical reason to favor one over the other. We are grateful to David

Harrison for noting this point in a posting to the Research Methods Division listserv group (RMNet).

Shared Leadership 25

RESULTS

Means, standard deviations, and zero-order correlations are found in Table 2 below. To

test Hypotheses 1 through 3, we used moderated regression. In step 1, we entered all of the

control variables. In step 2, we entered the two main effect variables – internal team environment

and coaching. In step 3, we tested for interactions by entering the product of internal team

environment and coaching. Table 3 presents these results. Team size was the only control

variable with a significant relationship with shared leadership (β = .37, p < .01). In step 2,

internal team environment had a direct relationship with shared leadership (β = .25, p < .05, one-

tailed), as did external coaching (β = .26, p < .05, one-tailed), supporting Hypotheses 1 and 2. In

step 3, we found the interaction effect between coaching and internal team environment to be

significant (β = -4.06, p < .05) and explaining an additional 5% of the variance. Following Aiken

& West’s (1991) methods for plotting interactions, we graphed these relationships in Figure 2. It

shows that internal team environment was significantly and positively related to shared

leadership for teams that had low coaching support, and was not related to shared leadership for

teams that had high coaching support. Teams with an unsupportive internal team environment

were still able to develop high levels of shared leadership, so long as they received a high level

of coaching. Thus, Hypothesis 3 was also supported.

---------------------------------

Insert Table 2 about here

Insert Table 3 about here

Insert Figure 2 about here

---------------------------------

In order to test Hypothesis 4, we used hierarchical regression. Team performance was

regressed on shared leadership after controlling for team size, project demands, gender diversity,

and race diversity, as well as the main effects of internal team environment and coaching, in

Shared Leadership 26

order to determine whether there was significant additional explained variance. The results

(Table 3) indicate that shared leadership is a strong positive predictor of team performance as

rated by the end users of the team’s work (β = .65, p < .001) and accounts for significant

variance in team performance above and beyond the control variables, internal team

environment, and coaching (ΔR2 = .26, p < .001). Thus, hypothesis 4 received strong support.

DISCUSSION

Our study makes three key contributions to the literature on team leadership. First, we

examined antecedent conditions for shared leadership and found that a team’s internal

environment and coaching by an external leader are important precursors for shared leadership.

Second, our findings show that coaching provided by the external team leader is particularly

important for the development of shared leadership when teams lack a strong internal team

environment. Third, it extends previous research suggesting positive effects of shared leadership

on team performance using a network based measure of shared leadership that better captures the

patterns of mutual influence inherent in the construct and a measure of performance that is less

subject to common source variance and rating biases.

Theoretical Implications

Despite early suggestions by scholars that shared internal leadership is important (e.g.,

Gibb, 1954; Katz & Kahn, 1978), team leadership theory has continued to focus primarily on the

role of external leaders and to use existing models of dyadic leadership extrapolated to the team

level (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003). Our findings suggest that a promising future direction is to

move the lens inward to investigate how team members themselves share the leadership

responsibilities of the team. Indeed, we found that teams relying on multiple members for

leadership performed better than those where internal leadership is relatively scarce. Importantly,

Shared Leadership 27

this finding is based on performance ratings provided by clients who focused on the quality of

the team’s final product rather than on the process and functioning of the team. This suggests

that shared leadership has benefits for work teams beyond just improved team processes. Shared

leadership can occur in teams with a designated formal leader or without one. The results of this

study do not mean that vertical leadership needs to be abandoned in favor of shared leadership;

rather, these two important sources of team leadership should be studied in combination

(Kozlowski & Bell, 2003).

Building on previous work that has advocated social network methodology to understand

relationships in teams (Mayo et al., 2003; Sparrowe et al., 2001), we advocate a network

approach to conceptualizing and measuring shared leadership as an important step forward.

Rather than capturing the team’s overall central tendency by taking the mean of a Likert scale,

this approach incorporates the pattern of leadership present throughout the team. By considering

all possible relationships in the team, this density measure captures the degree to which the team

as a whole relies heavily on most of its members for leadership. It thus allows for a closer

approximation to the theoretically rich concept of shared leadership.

This study also presents an initial understanding of antecedent conditions, both internal

and external to the team, which enable shared leadership to develop. We found that when teams

have an internal environment characterized by a clear and unifying direction that is well

understood within the team, a strong sense of interpersonal support where team members feel

recognized and encouraged, and where team members have a high level of voice and

involvement, teams are able to develop a leadership network characterized by high levels of

mutual influence and sharing of leadership responsibilities. Our findings also demonstrate the

importance of coaching by an external leader for supporting the emergence of shared leadership,

Shared Leadership 28

as well as when this coaching support is most necessary (Hackman & Wageman, 2005). When

an internal team environment is supportive, coaching by the external leader is less critical for

shared leadership to emerge; however, when an internal team environment is unsupportive,

coaching interventions are important for providing a role that is not being met by the team (cf.,

Hackman & Walton, 1986).

Managerial Implications

This study has important implications for team leaders and managers. First, the findings

suggest that organizations should help develop strong internal leadership patterns within their

teams to bolster effectiveness. Organizations can promote internal leadership by setting

expectations and encouraging members when teams initially form to view themselves and their

fellow team members as leaders and to engage in shared, mutual leadership. Organizations can

also provide training which fosters a shared leadership perspective and disseminates best

practices. Second, our results point to specific dimensions of the internal team environment -

shared purpose, social support, and voice - which support the development of shared leadership

within teams. Managers should therefore ensure that each team has a clear and shared sense of

direction and purpose, promote and establish norms of participation and input into the team’s

activities and strategies, and seek to foster a positive environment where team members

encourage one another and actively recognize each others’ contributions. Organizations may

further support these conditions by institutionalizing a team charter process whereby teams, upon

their initial formation, collectively identify and agree upon a common goal and set of priorities,

team roles and responsibilities, and team norms. Third, our findings suggest that external leaders

should engage in supportive coaching of the team in order to facilitate the development of shared

leadership. This can be in the form of encouraging, reinforcing, and rewarding instances where

Shared Leadership 29

team members demonstrate leadership, assisting teams when internal team conflicts arise (e.g.,

over sharing leadership responsibilities), providing general encouragement to the team as a

whole, and being available for suggestions or input into the team’s task strategies as needed

(Hackman & Wageman, 2005). Team leaders should pay particular attention to teams that may

have a weaker internal environment in order to provide additional motivation, guidance, and

support. However, for teams with a supportive internal environment, stronger coaching may not

provide much additional assistance in developing shared leadership.

Limitations and Future Research

Our study has several limitations that need to be addressed in future research. First, the

partial cross-sectional design does not allow for testing causality. While we did measure shared

leadership after it had been given time to develop, and collected outcome data from third parties

after team projects were complete, shared leadership is an emergent phenomenon and

longitudinal designs are needed to understand how shared leadership develops over time by

looking at changes in the leadership network across stages of team development. Second, while

the teams we studied performed real consulting engagements and were responsible to their

clients for delivering a completed project, team members were MBA students, not full time

employees. For team members who are full time employees working in different organizational

settings, shared leadership may operate differently. Third, there is the possibility of common

source variance influencing the relationship between internal team environment and shared

leadership since both measures were taken from team members. However, it is important to note

that internal team environment is a perceptual measure of the entire team’s behavior and actions,

whereas shared leadership is a network measure compiled from ratings of each individual team

member. This helps mitigate the likelihood that common source bias influences the relationship.

Shared Leadership 30

Additionally, there are both strengths and weaknesses to our measurement approach for

shared leadership that should be highlighted. Our measurement of shared leadership as network

density represents an improvement in this research field, notably by capturing the overall

patterns of shared influence within teams, and overcoming a primary limitation of behavioral

scales which restrict influence to a set of prescribed behaviors. Operationally, by asking

respondents broadly the extent to which team members exert “leadership” rather than detailing

specific leadership behaviors, our measure of shared leadership captures the respondents’

personal and implicit theories of leadership, and is consistent with the approach utilized by

others in similar contexts (e.g., Mehra et al., 2006). However, there are also notable limitations to

such an approach that should be highlighted. By neither specifying the meaning of leadership nor

priming specific behaviors for respondents in our measure, it is possible that our measure taps

into something other than leadership influence, such as participation and engagement, helping

and cooperation, or respect and listening among team members. Thus, future research along

these lines should consider providing leadership definitions and/or behavioral examples to

minimize the influence of differences in respondents’ attributions. Further, a richer

conceptualization and operationalization might be developed which, in addition to identifying

leadership sources, captures the quality and nature of leadership offered by each team member.

Future work should focus on a more detailed understanding of the nature of shared

leadership, its development, and boundary conditions of its effectiveness. While it seems clear

that relying on many team members for leadership can be an effective approach to team

leadership, there are many leadership styles that might be employed by team members such as

directive, transactional, transformational, and empowering as well as varying leadership roles

that might be adopted. Future research is needed to address how different leadership styles and

Shared Leadership 31

roles interrelate and complement one another when they are shared within teams, as well as the

relationship between shared leadership and external leadership beyond the effects of coaching.

Additional predictors of shared leadership development should also be examined, such as

team empowerment (e.g., Kirkman & Rosen, 1997), team composition (e.g., Cohen & Bailey,

1997), and contextual factors (e.g., Gladstein, 1984). Teams that are highly empowered should

be more likely to develop shared leadership as a result of the autonomy and meaningfulness of

the work they are doing as well as strong collective beliefs about their potency and impact

(Kirkman & Rosen, 1997). The composition of a team in terms of size, and characteristics such

as experience, expertise, personality, as well as demographic compositional patterns such as the

existence of faultlines (Lau & Murnighan, 1998) may also play a role in the development of

shared leadership. Finally, in addition to external coaching there may also be other contextual

factors that impact shared leadership such as reward and recognition systems, training in

important teamwork and leadership skills, and the nature of the task itself (e.g., Hackman, 1987).

Potential mediating mechanisms linking shared leadership to performance and other

effectiveness criteria should be explored as well. For instance, the reciprocal interactions and

influential exchanges between team members may facilitate development of team knowledge

structures such as transactive memory systems or shared mental models. In addition to serving as

a potential antecedent, team empowerment may be another mediating mechanism through which

leadership becomes shared among team members (Kirkman & Rosen, 1997).

There are also a number of important boundary conditions for the effectiveness of shared

leadership that should be examined, such as the distribution of task competence, task

interdependence, the complexity of the task, the life cycle of the team, and cultural values

(Pearce & Conger, 2003). Shared leadership is likely to be more effective when team members

Shared Leadership 32

have a high level of task competence, when the task is relatively complex, when task

interdependence is high, and when the team life cycle allows for the development of shared

leadership. It is also likely to be affected by cultural values, particularly power distance and

collectivism (Gibson & Zellmer-Bruhn, 2001; Kirkman & Shapiro, 1997), and may be more

likely to develop and thrive in cultures that are low in power distance and cultures that are high

in collectivism (Carson, 2005).

Finally, team size was found to have a strong positive relationship with shared leadership.

Our interpretation of this finding is that teams with more members have greater potential

leadership resources available for sharing. However, we might expect a nonlinear relationship

between team size and shared leadership in teams that are larger than those in our study. Beyond

a certain point in larger teams, we may see either a detrimental or ceiling effect on shared

leadership, perhaps as the result of social loafing or free-riding. Future research should explore

these nonlinear possibilities further by sampling teams with greater range on team size.

Conclusion

As organizations continue to devote vast resources to the use of teams and teamwork,

the need for a better understanding of effective team leadership continues to grow. This study

provides an important contribution by highlighting the importance of leadership input from

multiple team members, and suggests that shared leadership is a critical factor that can improve

team performance from the viewpoint of customers or end users of a team’s work. While not a

final statement on the topic, this study adds to the growing body of evidence that suggests that

teams do well when they rely on leadership provided by the team as a whole rather than looking

to a single individual to lead them.

Shared Leadership 33

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Shared Leadership 41

Appendix A

Items Assessing Internal Team Environment for Shared Leadership

Shared Purpose

The members of my team…

1. Spent time discussing our team’s purpose, goals, and expectations for the project.

2. Discuss our team’s main tasks and objectives to ensure that we have a fair understanding.

3. Devise action plans and time schedules that allow for meeting our team’s goals.

Social Support

The members of my team…

4. Talk enthusiastically about our team’s progress.

5. Recognize each other’s accomplishments and hard work.

6. Give encouragement to team members who seem frustrated.

Voice

7. People in this team are encouraged to speak up to test assumptions about issues under

discussion.

8. As a member of this team, I have a real say in how this team carries out its work.

9. Everyone on this team has a chance to participate and provide input.

10. My team supports everyone actively participating in decision making.

Shared Leadership 42

TABLE 1

Previous Definitions and Measures of Shared Leadership

Definition Measure DV

Avolio, Jung, Murry,

& Sivasubramanium

(1996)

No explicit definition given, but shared

leadership is essentially viewed as

transformational leadership manifested at the

group level in highly developed teams

Team Multifactor

Leadership

Questionnaire (TMLQ –

Form 5X) aggregated to

the team level

Self-report ratings

(undergraduate

project team

effectiveness)

Pearce & Sims

(2002)

Distributed influence from within the team.

(p. 172)

Lateral influence among peers. (p. 176)

Ratings (aggregated to

team level) on behavioral

scales for five leadership

strategies: Aversive,

Directive, Transactional,

Transformational, and

Empowering

Self-report and

manager ratings of

seven effectiveness

dimensions

(automobile

change

management

teams)

Sivasubramanium,

Murry, Avolio, &

Jung (2002)

Collective influence of members in a team

on each other. (p. 68)

How members of a group evaluate the

influence of the group as opposed to one

individual within or external to the group.

(p. 68)

Team Multifactor

Leadership

Questionnaire (TMLQ –

Form 5X) aggregated to

the team level

Team potency

(self-ratings at

Time 1 and 2) and

team grade

assigned by

instructor

(undergraduate

project team

effectiveness)

Pearce & Conger

(2003)

A dynamic, interactive influence process

among individuals in groups for which the

objective is to lead one another to the

achievement of group or organizational goals

or both. …(L)eadership is broadly

distributed among a set of individuals instead

of centralized in [the] hands of a single

individual who acts in the role of a superior.

(p. 1)

N/A N/A

Pearce, Yoo, & Alavi

(2004)

Simultaneous, ongoing, mutual influence

process within a team that is characterized

by “serial emergence” of official as well as

unofficial leaders. (p. 48)

Ratings (aggregated to

team level) on behavioral

scales for four leadership

strategies: Directive,

Transactional,

Transformational, and

Empowering

Self-ratings of

problem-solving

quality and

effectiveness

(virtual teams of

student social

workers)

Ensley, Hmieleski, &

Pearce (2006)

Team process where leadership is carried out

by the team as a whole, rather than solely by

a single designated individual. (p. 220)

Ratings (aggregated to

team level) on behavioral

scales for four leadership

strategies: Directive,

Transactional,

Transformational, and

Empowering

Growth index for

new ventures,

consisting of the

average of firm

revenue growth

and employee

growth rates (new

venture TMTs)

Mehra, Smith,

Dixon, & Robertson

(2006)

Shared, distributed phenomenon in which

there can be several (formally appointed

and/or emergent) leaders. (p. 233)

Qualitative coding based

on visual analysis of

leadership network

diagrams

Team sales divided

by team size

(financial services

sales teams)

Shared Leadership 43

TABLE 2

Descriptive Statistics and Correlationsa

Variable Mean s.d. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1. Team Performanceb 5.81 1.02 (.93)

2. Shared Leadership 3.16 0.35 .46* --

3. Internal Team Environment 4.08 0.41 .19 .33* (.94)

4. Coaching 3.76 0.64 -.03 .37* .24 (.92)

5. Team Size 5.93 0.72 .10 .28* .42* -.15 --

6. Project Demandsb 4.38 1.19 -.26 .20 -.22 .22 -.04 (.75)

7. Gender Diversity .55 .18 -.20 -.22 -.14 -.15 .00 .05 --

8. Race Diversity .74 .27 .03 .03 .02 -.24 .02 -.14 -.05 --

a N = 59 for most variables (N = 51 for variable 6, N = 56 for variable 1 due to missing data). Scale reliabilities are in parentheses

along the diagonal.

b These variables were measured using 7-point Likert scales. All other scales were measured using 5-point Likert scales.

* p < .05

Shared Leadership 44

TABLE 3

Results of Regression Analyses

Variable

Shared

Leadershipa

Team

Performanceb

Step 1

Team Size .37* .11

Project Demands .22 -.25

Gender Diversity -.24 -.21

Race Diversity -.04 -.02

R2 .23* .12

Step 2

Internal Team Environment .25* .25

Coaching .26* -.14

R2 .39* .16

ΔR2 .16* .04

Step 3

Internal Team Environment x Coaching -4.06*

Shared Leadership .65*

R2 .44* .42*

ΔR2 .05* .26*

Adjusted R2 .32

a Estimates are standardized regression coefficients. N = 51.

b Estimates are standardized regression coefficients. N = 49.

* p < .05

Shared Leadership 45

FIGURE 1

Leadership Sociograms

Lowest Level of

Shared Leadership

(score = 2.40)

Median Level of

Shared Leadership

(score = 3.15)

Highest Level of

Shared Leadership

(score = 3.90)

Shared Leadership 46

FIGURE 2

The Moderating Effect of Coaching on the Relationship Between

Internal Team Environment and Shared Leadership

3.28

2.95

3.25

3.35

2.8

2.9

3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5

Not supportive Supportive

Internal Team Environment

Shared

Leadership

Low Coaching

High Coaching

Shared Leadership 47

Author Bios

Jay B. Carson (jcarson@cox.smu.edu) is an assistant professor at the Edwin L. Cox School of

Business, Southern Methodist University. He received his Ph.D. from the Robert H. Smith

School of Business, University of Maryland. His research interests are in leadership, teams, and

cross-cultural issues, with a current focus on shared leadership and internal leadership in teams.

Paul Tesluk (ptesluk@rhsmith.umd.edu) is an associate professor at the Robert H. Smith School

of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on team

effectiveness, leadership development, and innovation processes in organizations. He received

his Ph.D. from Penn State University.

Jennifer A. Marrone (marronej@seattleu.edu) is an assistant professor at the Albers School of

Business and Economics, Seattle University. She received her Ph.D. from the Robert H. Smith

School of Business, University of Maryland. Her research interests include team processes and

performance, leadership, and strategic human resource management, with an emphasis on

applying multi-level perspectives and techniques.

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