Shared leadership is a leadership style that broadly distributes leadership responsibility, such that people within a team and organization lead each other. It has frequently been compared to horizontal leadership, distributed leadership, and collective leadership and is most contrasted with more traditional "vertical" or "hierarchical" leadership that resides predominantly with an individual instead of a group.
Definitions
Shared leadership can be defined in a number of ways, but all definitions describe a similar phenomenon: team leadership by more than just an appointed leader. Below are examples from researchers in this field:
Yukl (1989): "Individual members of a team engaging in activities that influence the team and other team members." Pearce and Sims (2001): "Leadership that emanates from members of teams, and not simply from the appointed leader." Pearce and Conger (2003): "A dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals and groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both." They also added that "this influence process often involves peer, or lateral, influence and at other times involves upward or downward hierarchical influence".Pearce, C. L., & Conger, J.A. (2002) Shared leadership: reframing the hows and whys of leadership. New York: Sage Publications, Inc Carson, Tesluck, and Marrone (2007): "An emergent team property that results from the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members." Bergman, Rentsch, Small, Davenport, and Bergman (2012): "Shared leadership occurs when two or more members engage in the leadership of the team in an effort to influence and direct fellow members to maximize team effectiveness." Hoch, J. E. (2013): "Reflects a situation where multiple team members engage in leadership and is characterized by collaborative decision-making and shared responsibility for outcomes."
Shared leadership is also commonly thought of as the "serial emergence" of multiple leaders over the life of a team, stemming from interactions among team members in which at least one team member tries to influence other members or the team in general.Carson et al., 2007 While the definition clearly has several variants, they all make the fundamental distinction between shared leadership and more traditional notions of hierarchical leadership. As Pearce, Manz and Sims (2009) summarize, all definitions of shared leadership consistently include a "process of influence" that is "built upon more than just downward influence on subordinates or followers by an appointed or elected leader." Nearly all concepts of shared leadership entail the practice of "broadly sharing power and influence among a set of individuals rather than centralizing it in the hands of a single individual who acts in the clear role of a dominant superior." Therefore, shared leadership is an emergent team property of mutual influence and shared responsibility among team members, whereby they lead each other toward goal achievement. It differs from team leadership, team processes and team work in that shared leadership describes a set of cooperatively oriented cognitions, attitudes, and actions through which team members convert member inputs to team outputs.
Background
Though a relatively new phenomenon in the literature, the concept of shared leadership can actually be traced back several centuries. In a 2002 paper, David Sally noted that shared leadership was present even in the early days of Republican Rome. Indeed, during those ancient times, Rome "had a successful system of co-leadership that lasted for over four centuries. This structure of co-leadership was so effective that it extended from the lower levels of the Roman magistracy to the very top position, that of consul." (Sally, 2002) Despite such early iterations of the practice, however, most of the scholarly work on leadership has still been predominantly focused on the study of leadership in its hierarchical form. Leadership is conceived around a single individual – the leader – and how that person inspires, entices, commands, cajoles and controls followers. Research on shared leadership instead departs from the notion that leadership may well be studied as a collective phenomenon, as activities involving several individuals beyond the formally appointed manager.Crevani et al., 2010; Denis et al., 2012
There are some earlier conceptualizations of shared leadership. In 1924, Mary Parker Follet wrote that "one should not only look to the designated leader, but one should let logic dictate to whom one should look for guidance" (as cited by Crainer, 2002, p. 72).Crainer, S. (2000). The Management Century. New York: Jossey-Bass. Along similar lines, Gibb, in 1954, wrote that, "Leadership is probably best conceived as a group quality, as a set of functions which must be carried out by the group."Gibb, C. A., Gilbert, D. T., & Lindzey, G. (1954). Leadership. New York: John Wiley & Sons (p.54) Despite these early nods toward group leadership, the formalized construct of shared leadership did not become more developed and experimentally explored until recently. Current research suggest that shared leadership forms may imply significant advantages at individual-, team-, organizational- and societal levels.Crevani et al, 2007
The shift in this scholarly paradigm might partly be explained by looking at the rise of studies on teamwork. Teamwork is becoming increasingly important in the workplace literature as many organizations recognize the benefits that teamwork can bring. Thus, organizations consider it important to investigate team effectiveness and the elements that increase this. Leaders have been pointed to as critical factors in team performance and effectiveness; some have even gone as far as to say they the most important ingredient for team effectiveness.Carson et al., 2007 Additionally, problems associated with team leaders are often cited as the primary reason for failures of work involving teams.Bergman et al., 2012
With the complexity and ambiguity of tasks that teams often experience, it is becoming more apparent that a single leader is unlikely to have all of the skills and traits to effectively perform the necessary leadership functions.Carson et al., 2007 Shared leadership has been identified as the optimal model of leadership when the knowledge characteristics of interdependence, creativity, and complexity are encountered. Thus, shared leadership is becoming increasingly popular in teams, as multiple team members emerge as leaders, especially when they have the skills/knowledge/expertise that the team needs.
Measuring There are two main ways that most researchers measure the existence and extent of shared leadership in a team: Ratings of the team's collective leadership behavior and Social Network Analysis. A less common technique of measuring shared leadership is with the use of behaviorally anchored rating scales.
Ratings of team's collective leadership behavior Many studies measure shared leadership as team member perceptions of leader behavior exhibited by respective team leaders and team members.Pearce & Sims, 2001 Often this is done by distributing leader behavior questionnaires (surveys aimed at measuring the existence and frequency of different leader behaviors) to all members of a team. Team members are instructed to fill these out once for the appointed leader and then again for all other team members. Although this allows leadership quantity to be assessed, it does not pinpoint how many other team members are engaging in leadership behaviors or how many members are looking to the same people for leadership.
Social network analysis Social network analysis (SNA) addresses some of the flaws of collective leader behavior ratings by assessing the patterns of connections that emerge in a team and providing a method for modeling both vertical and shared leadership within a team. SNA examines the relationships that form between individuals and uses these relationships as the units of analysis. In the leadership domain, a relationship, or "tie" as it is referred to in SNA literature, occurs when one team member perceives another as exerting leadership influence on the team. The proportion of actual ties that exist in a team to all potential ties that could have emerged in a team is called network density and can be used as a measure of shared leadership.
Some researchers go further into SNA and analyze a network's centralization, which helps assess the distribution of leadership, as well as the quantity. Network centralization is measured using centrality values that are calculated for each individual. A centrality value for an individual represents the number of connections that individual has with others. The sum of the differences between the maximum individual centrality value and every other individual centrality value, divided by the maximum possible sum of differences, produces a measure of network centralization between 0 and 1, which describes the extent to which connections are concentrated around one individual, or if multiple individuals are central to the leadership network.
A shared leadership network can be further separated into distributed-coordinated or distributed-fragmented by SNA.Mehra et al., 2006 This distinction depends on whether the formal and emergent leaders in a network recognize each other as leaders and are able to coordinate and lead together efficiently.Mehra et al., 2006
Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) Some studies have sought to measure shared leadership through observations of actual leadership behaviors. Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) are commonly used to assess and rate performances, and can be developed to assess different leadership behaviors. Bergman et al. (2012), for example, developed such a scale and had trained raters watch videotapes of team interactions and rate each team member's behavior in terms of the dimensions on the BARS. They then operationalized shared leadership as the number of members who performed leadership behaviors, as well as the amount of leadership behavior exhibited by the team (calculated by aggregating the leadership ratings for each team member to the team level).Bergman et al., 2012
There are advantages and disadvantages to each measurement technique. Although all are attempting to measure the same phenomenon and all have been used in published studies, the particular measure that a researcher uses can impact his or her results.
Antecedents: internal and external conditions A host of scholars who have studied shared leadership found that in order for the dynamic to properly emerge, two preconditions must be met. First, team members must actually be willing to extend their feedback to the team in a way that aims to influence and motivate the direction of the group. Second, the team must overall be disposed to accept and rely on such feedback by other team members.Katz, D., & Kahn, R. L. (1978). The preconditions specified by Katz and Kahn (1978) tend to be met by leadership sharing in teams by the development of interpersonal alliances (measured by LMX-TEAM) between and among participants as several meta-analyses reported.Graen, G. B. (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Leadership, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Graen, G. B. (2013. The Social Psychology of Organizations, 2nd Ed. London: Wiley Carson et al. (2007) expanded these two requirements by describing them in a larger, two-part framework that includes the degree to which a strong internal team environment exists and the extent to which positive external team coaching occurs.Carson et al
Internal team environment