Exploring the impact of shared leadership on management team member job outcomes

Sharing leadership behaviors in virtual teams: effects of shared leadership behaviors on team member satisfaction and productivity

Purpose

Virtual collaboration in teams becomes increasingly popular at work. With the advantages of working in virtual teams come leadership challenges for which the shared leadership theory is discussed as a potential solution. While previous empirical studies investigating shared leadership in virtual teams generally confirm positive effects on team outcomes, this study aims to investigate in detail the leadership behaviors that are typically shared in these settings and how these shared leadership behaviors affect individual level outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach

Individuals from different teams participated in a questionnaire study (n = 411). Structural equation modeling was used to assess the effects of shared task- and relations-oriented leadership behaviors on team member’s subjectively perceived productivity and satisfaction with leadership.

Findings

Results indicate that shared task-oriented leadership behaviors have a significant positive effect on subjectively perceived productivity and satisfaction with leadership, while relations-oriented leadership behaviors have a significant negative effect. A hypothesis stipulating a moderating effect of task interdependence was not confirmed.

Practical implications

Practical implications include that in virtual teams with hierarchical organizational structures, it may be recommended that task-oriented leadership behaviors are shared among team members, whereas relations-oriented leadership behaviors should remain the responsibility of the official leader.

Originality/value

The findings complement previous research with new insights on behavioral dimensions of shared leadership and their effects on outcomes on the level of the individual.

Does shared leadership always work? A state-of-the-art review and future prospects

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to sort out the potential dark sides of shared leadership, so as to promote a more comprehensive and balanced views of the impact of shared leadership and provide directions for future research.

Design/methodology/approach

Through extensive database and manual searches, 766 literature records were obtained. After three rounds of literature screening, 17 studies were retained. On this basis, the 17 studies were coded and analyzed.

Findings

From the perspectives of individual motivation, hierarchical functionalism and leadership role configuration, the existing studies have explored the negative impacts of shared leadership on team members, formal team leaders and the overall work teams. Specifically, for team members, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like power struggle, role stress and knowledge hiding. For formal team leaders, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like psychological territorial loss, leadership motivation declines and the dualistic paradox of self and group. For the overall work teams, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like team performance inhibition, low decision-making efficiency, team responsibility dispersion and team creativity decline. Meanwhile, contextual factors play a key role in determining the effects of shared leadership.

Originality/value

Through a systematic review of the negative impact of shared leadership, this study responds to the research calls for exploring the dark sides of shared leadership, provides the academic community with a more comprehensive and balanced view of the impact of shared leadership, and identifies several directions for future research.

Burden or opportunity? The role of employees' regulatory focus in shaping the motivational processes of empowering leadership

Purpose

The potential contradictory impact of empowering leadership may obfuscate its effectiveness. Empowering leadership is characterized not only by increased employees' autonomy but also by additional responsibilities and work demands, which may trigger different motivational processes for employees and lead to different perceptions of job stressors. This research aims to explore such contradictory impacts of empowering leadership on employees' perceived stressors by clarifying the complex motivational processes (intrinsic/extrinsic) experienced by employees when facing empowering leadership, as well as the boundary condition of employees' regulatory focus based on regulatory focus theory and self-determination theory (SDT).

Design/methodology/approach

The authors examine the proposed theoretical model using a two-wave survey, with the data being collected from 294 employees working at a hotel in China.

Findings

The results show that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation mediate the relationship between empowering leadership and employees' perceived stressors and demonstrate the moderating role of an employee's regulatory focus. Specifically, a high promotion focus strengthens the relationship between empowering leadership and intrinsic motivation, while a high prevention focus strengthens the relationship between empowering leadership and extrinsic motivation.

Practical implications

Managers should consider the attributes of front-line service employees (e.g. are they promotion-focused or prevention-focused?) when demonstrating empowering leadership to prevent employees from misinterpreting that leadership as a source of stress.

Originality/value

This research helps to reconcile previously conflicting findings on empowering leadership by clarifying the complex motivational processes behind it. Furthermore, this research adopts a regulatory focus perspective to suggest that the reason why employees respond to their leaders differently is inherently associated with each employee's motivational tendencies.

Emergence and outcomes of shared leadership: unraveling the role of transactive memory system and team mindfulness using mixed-methods approach

Purpose

Shared leadership literature has primarily focused on investigating its positive impact on performance. Thus, the existing understanding of the emergence of shared leadership is limited. Also, there is a dearth of literature identifying the impact of shared leadership on affective outcomes. This study investigates the impact of transactive memory system and team mindfulness on shared leadership, and subsequently, the impact of shared leadership on team satisfaction through the mediating mechanism of thriving.

Design/methodology/approach

The study adopted a mixed-methods approach with sequential explanatory research design. Quantitative study was carried out with a sample of 40 teams. Data were collected at four different time points. Qualitative interviews with 10 teams were carried out to provide insights about the relationships which emerged from the quantitative study.

Findings

The study found support for the impact of transactive memory on shared leadership. However, contrary to our hypothesis, the study found that the interaction effect of transactive memory system and team mindfulness on shared leadership is such that team mindfulness has preventive impact on lack of transactive memory. The results indicate that shared leadership influences team satisfaction through the mediating mechanism of employee thriving.

Originality/value

The study examines under-explored antecedent and boundary condition of emergence of shared leadership, i.e. transactive memory system and team mindfulness. Also, the study makes a methodological contribution by examining the dynamics of shared leadership through both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Shared Leadership and Team Effectiveness: An Investigation of Whether and When in Engineering Design Teams

Shared leadership is lauded to be a performance-enhancing approach with applications in many management domains. It is conceptualized as a dynamic team process as it evolves over time. However, it is surprising to find that there are no studies that have examined its temporally relevant boundary conditions for the effectiveness of the team. Contributing to an advanced understanding of the mechanism of shared leadership in engineering design teams, this research aims to investigate whether shared leadership is positively related to team effectiveness and when shared leadership is more likely to be effective. Using a field sample of 119 individuals in 26 engineering design teams from China and the technique of social network analysis, we found that, consistent with cognate studies, shared leadership is positively related to team effectiveness when measured in terms of team task performance and team viability. Moreover, by integrating the project life cycle as a moderator, this study is among the first to investigate the temporal factors, for the effectiveness of shared leadership. The result shows that the stage of the project life cycle moderates the positive shared leadership-team effectiveness relationship, such that this association is stronger at the early phase than at the later phase of the project. Overall, these findings offer insightful thoughts to scholars in the field of shared leadership and bring practical suggestions for project managers in business who seek to implement best practice in organizations toward high team effectiveness.

The Power of Empowerment: Predictors and Benefits of Shared Leadership in Organizations

Leadership plays an essential part in creating competitive advantage and well-being among employees. One way in which formal leaders can deal with the variety of responsibilities that comes with their role is to share their responsibilities with team members (i.e., shared leadership). Although there is abundant literature on how high-quality peer leadership benefits team effectiveness (TE) and well-being, there is only limited evidence about the underpinning mechanisms of these relationships and how the formal leader can support this process. To address this lacuna, we conducted an online survey study with 146 employees from various organizations. The results suggest that an empowering leadership style of the formal leader is associated with higher perceived peer leadership quality (PLQ) on four different leadership roles (i.e., task, motivational, social, and external leader). In addition, formal leaders who empower their team members are also perceived as better leaders themselves. Moreover, the improved PLQ was in turn positively related to TE and work satisfaction, while being negatively related to burnout. In line with the social identity approach, we found that team identification mediated these relationships. Thus, high-quality peer leaders succeeded in creating a shared sense of “us” in the team, and this team identification in turn generated all the positive outcomes. To conclude, by sharing their lead and empowering the peer leaders in their team, formal leaders are key drivers of the team’s effectiveness, while also enhancing team members’ health and well-being.

Measuring and Exploring Factors of Shared Leadership in the Context of Indian IT Sector

This research article explores the factors of shared leadership in IT sector in India. A reliable and a valid scale for the measurement of shared leadership (Scale for Measuring Shared Leadership, SMSL) is therefore developed as the previous researches brought to light the requirement of such scales which relate to the Indian IT sector. An attempt is made to reduce large number of variables, studied in relation to the shared leadership from various books and research journals, to a few workable factors and analyse how the factors derived explain the latent construct of shared leadership in the context of IT sector in India. The article also explores the factors of shared leadership using the factorial analysis of the data collected from teams working in the IT sector in India. It is a team level study of shared leadership in IT sector with a focus on obtaining the factors by using the factor analysis method on IBM SPSS. The various variables by which researchers have tried to explain the construct of shared leadership were collected from secondary sources which were then used to develop a questionnaire. The questionnaire was pilot tested and its reliability and validity was evaluated thereafter. Data collected was put to factor analysis through SPSS software to obtain the factors explaining the shared leadership construct in the context of the Indian IT sector. Numerous variables were reduced to few factors. With their help, these factors of the shared leadership in IT sector could be explained as a construct. The findings of this article also include explanation of the variations in the construct of shared leadership in IT sector and which factors contribute in what order to these variations.

A Meta-Analysis of Shared Leadership: Antecedents, Consequences, and Moderators

Many organizations are encouraging a shared leadership approach that meets the increased complexity of today’s working environment. It is therefore imperative for researchers to clearly comprehend the mechanism of shared leadership in teams. Contributing to the burgeoning research in the field of shared leadership, this study aims to advance our understanding along the many dimensions of the shared leadership phenomenon: its antecedents, moderators, and consequences. In this article, we provide a critical and comprehensive analysis of the extant literature and generate an integrated framework that presents seven hypotheses and five research questions. We then empirically test this framework via a systematic meta-analysis from 40 studies (team n = 3,019). Significantly, our findings reveal that the internal team environment and team heterogeneity are positively related to the emergence of shared leadership in teams. Moreover, we confirm the positive relationship between shared leadership and team outcomes. Our analysis also highlights how intragroup trust and task interdependence significantly moderate the shared leadership–team outcomes relations, with higher correlations observed in greater levels of intragroup trust, as well as larger levels of task interdependence. We also find the moderating effect of shared leadership measurement methods in such relations. Specifically, there is a stronger relationship when shared leadership is measured with social network analysis, rather than aggregating approaches. Overall, our study brings valuable insights into the shared leadership area and provides clear directions for future research.

Ethical leadership and staff retention: The moderating role of job resources in Uganda’s healthcare sector

Orientation: Retention of quality staff in a highly competitive and dynamic working environment has made retention research necessary. Current focus is on how job resources influence ethical leadership in driving staff retention. Studies investigating the moderation effect of job resources in the ethical leadership–staff retention sequence in Uganda’s healthcare sector are scarce. Thus, the establishment of the moderation effect of job resources in the ethical leadership–staff retention sequence was needed.Research purpose: This study aimed at examining the moderating role of job resources in the association between ethical leadership and staff retention.Motivation for the study: Staff retention in Uganda’s healthcare sector is pervasive even with several government interventions such as salary enhancement. Rising maternal and infant mortality rates, low immunisation coverage, inter alia, are some of the effects. Reversing this scenario calls for leaders to exercise ethical leadership.Research approach/design and method: This study utilised a cross-sectional research design. Analyses were conducted by SPSS v. 21 on a sample of 214 healthcare workers.Main findings: The results show that ethical leadership positively affects staff retention. Also, the moderation role of the composite job resources variable in the ethical leadership–staff retention sequence was significant.Practical/managerial implications: This study demonstrated the important contribution of both ethical leadership and job resources in staff retention management.Contribution/value-add: This moderation model offers an additional complete explanation for the moderating effect of job resources in these conditions. The study also contributes to theory by demonstrating that contrary to the previous investigations where ethical leadership has been studied as an outcome variable, it is a predictor variable of staff retention.

Corporate entrepreneurship strategy: an analysis of top management teams in SMEs

Purpose

In order to learn more about the antecedents of strategy at the top management team’s (TMT) level, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of TMT cultural intelligence on corporate entrepreneurship strategy. Then, the authors examine how TMT’s ambiguity tolerance mediates this relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors tested the hypothesis by collecting survey data from 41 TMTs of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the south-east of Iran.

Findings

The survey results confirm that a high level of cultural intelligence in TMTs is conducive to corporate entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the result shows that higher levels of cultural intelligence in TMTs relate to a higher level of ambiguity tolerance, which, in turn, enhances the possibility of pursuing corporate entrepreneurship strategy by SMEs.

Research limitations/implications

The data for this study were obtained from 41 TMTs in the south-east of Iran, which increases the probability that the results may not be directly transferable to certain companies in Western countries. Future research might attempt to test the ideas developed in this paper across different settings and samples.

Originality/value

Several theoretical and empirical studies have explored possible antecedents of corporate entrepreneurship. But a few papers investigated the role of TMT dispositions on corporate entrepreneurship strategy. By addressing the prominent role of TMT psychological dispositions on corporate entrepreneurship strategy, this paper attempts to fill this gap.

Shared leadership in teams

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the effect of shared leadership on student project team processes and outcomes. The authors focused on shared leadership and its association with team processes (coordination, goal commitment and knowledge sharing) and team performance.

Design/methodology/approach

To examine the shared leadership, team processes and performance model, the authors conducted two separate surveys of 158 graduate and undergraduate students working in project teams at a large southwestern university.

Findings

Results showed that shared leadership positively affected coordination activities, goal commitment and knowledge sharing, which in turn positively affect team performance. Each team process factor had a mediation effect, although shared leadership had no direct effect on team performance.

Research limitations/implications

This research adds to the knowledge of important team process factors through which shared leadership indirectly affects team performance.

Practical implications

Based on the findings, the authors provided implications for students and instructors that shared leadership can facilitate team performance by enabling team members to coordinate activities, commit to goals and share knowledge effectively.

Originality/value

This study presents an initial understanding of the shared leadership-team performance relationship by introducing influential variables, such as coordination activities, goal commitment and knowledge sharing in a team.

How virtual team leaders cope with creativity challenges

Purpose

As technology-mediated communication improves, many organizations increasingly use new types of collaborative online tools to promote team-based learning and performance. The purpose of this study is to explore how virtual team leaders cope with process challenges in developing a context for team creativity.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors interviewed nine leaders who have worked for more than five years and managed virtual teams in different fields.

Findings

This research uncovered distrust, personality differences, generational differences in views, scheduling issues and technology difficulties as the top five inhibitors for virtual team creativity and success. The authors identified seven main strategies for developing virtual team creativity and success. The authors found that building “team norms” and guidelines to encourage positive interactions between team members can facilitate team creativity. In addition, a concept of trust-based open communication was identified as one of the important strategies when teams actively use technology-mediated communication tools.

Practical implications

Organizational practitioners can use the results of this study when developing knowledge to establish assessments regarding which employees possess the appropriate characteristics to lead virtual teams and implement virtual team training.

Originality/value

This study emphasizes the importance of technology in professional lives by showing how technology-mediated work leads to success in learning and producing creative ideas and performance in a virtual team environment.

Sharing, Caring, and Responsibility in Higher Education Teams

In recent decades, there has been a growing attention toward using teamwork and the commitment and productivity of teams to improve the quality of education and research in higher education institutes. To achieve these goals, the leadership style of team leaders and group organizational citizenship behavior (GOCB) of team members who exceed their formal roles are of high importance. This article explores the effects of shared leadership on group commitment and productivity of 70 university teams. It also investigates whether GOCB mediates the effect of shared leadership on team commitment and productivity. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and SmartPLS software are applied to investigate the relationship between variables. The results show that shared leadership has both direct and indirect (through GOCB) effects on team commitment and productivity. Shared leadership affects GOCB, team commitment, and team productivity. Furthermore, GOCB affects team commitment and team productivity.

Team-Centric Leadership: An Integrative Review

This integrative review focuses on leadership in the context of work groups and teams: team-centric leadership. Although the process of leadership is largely viewed as one of social influence, most theories of leadership are agnostic about the social units and context within which it occurs. The review examines recent research on mainstream leadership theories—transformational leadership and leader-member exchange—that have contextualized leadership in work teams and also on team-centric leadership theories—shared and functional leadership—that are explicitly team centric. For each theory, we examine its conceptualization and evolution, how well it maps to the input-process-output heuristic of team effectiveness (including moderators indicative of the context, process dynamics, and feedback loops), and the quality of research methods that are employed. The discussion concludes with 14 recommendations designed to advance each type of team-centric leadership and to promote more integration and synergy across the approaches in future research.

Leadership style and job satisfaction in higher education institutions

Purpose

– Although leadership is found to have impact on the followers’ attitudes and performance there is a gap in leadership studies in HEIs, especially having Lithuania in mind. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of leadership style on job satisfaction of faculty in higher education institutions (HEI).

Design/methodology/approach

– In order to investigate before mentioned problem, the representative quantitative empirical research was conducted in 2013. It includes 72 faculty members and ten supervisors from Lithuanian public and private universities. The survey was conducted to check how leadership styles of supervisors influence faculty job satisfaction and compare the opinion of supervisors and subordinates.

Findings

– The empirical research revealed significant positive impact of leadership style on job satisfaction of faculty where servant leadership style has been found to have the highest positive significant impact on job satisfaction of faculty while controlling autocrat leadership style has the lowest impact.

Research limitations/implications

– There are several implications for further research. It can be expanded whether geographically (e.g. comparative analysis in different countries) or institutionally (e.g. in other educational institutions, such as schools or pre-schools).

Practical implications

– Practical implications reveal that supervisors have the power to increase the levels of job satisfaction of their faculty members, by defining their role as a leader, demonstrating certain leadership behaviors.

Originality/value

– This survey covers the area which lacks academic research, namely, the impact of leadership on HEI faculty. Previous leadership studies in HEI focus on particular leadership style demonstrated (van Ameijde, 2009), the impact of leadership on culture (Asmawi et al., 2013), organizational effectiveness (Siddique et al., 2011) and other factors. However, very few of them (one of the examples is the study of Webb, 2009 in USA) investigate the direct managers’ leadership style and faculty job satisfaction. Besides, the previous surveys have not covered as many leadership styles as this one does.

Examining teamwork and leadership in the fields of public administration, leadership, and management

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of papers in ten top scholarly journals to determine their overall examination of leadership in teams and to identify which models of teamwork and leadership have been most explored by researchers.

Design/methodology/approach

– This paper reaches its findings through content analysis of 80 journal papers published in top academic journals from 1999 through 2012. Coding based on categories of teams, leadership and leadership styles conformed to forced choice and latent coding; two independent reviewers managed the subjectivity of the coding.

Findings

– Sixty per cent of the papers studied explored a group of workers whose teamwork was expected to be permanent, which receives a strong direction from a designated leader; almost that many (58.75 per cent) explored a group working with formal leadership by the worker’s supervisor; almost 50 per cent of papers explored leadership that combined two or more leadership styles simultaneously. This heavy concentration of the literature in a few areas suggests that research on other types of teamwork and leadership is minimal.

Research limitations/implications

– This particular research utilized the latent coding method of content analysis and forced choice in the selections. Even though content analysis has many strengths, the latent coding method of content analysis and forced choice selections require the researcher to examine the overall content to determine whether certain variables were present or absent. After the examination of the overall content, a subjective interpretation of the data is needed from the researcher. Other researchers that look at the same data may interpret the data differently.

Practical implications

– This research provides researchers, academics and practitioners with a comprehensive analysis on teamwork and leadership. The extensive investigation presents a pivotal starting point for further developments in this emerging area. The content analysis found a proliferation of diverse organizations utilizing teamwork, and this subject should be researched more vigorously. As organizations continue to embrace, pursue and promote teamwork, understanding the current state of the field will assist in having better understanding on how to develop effective teams.

Originality/value

– This paper contributes to the field by creating taxonomy to categorize the types of leaders and teams and presenting an explanation on the distinction between traditional and horizontal style of leadership. In identifying major trends in the existent literature, this examination provides valuable information for researchers.