The present study examined the process of shared leadership in 45 ad hoc decision-making teams. Each team member's leadership behavior (n = 180) was assessed by behaviorally coding videotapes of the teams' discussions. The within-team patterns of leadership behavior were examined using cluster analysis. Results indicated that the likelihood of a team experiencing a full range of leadership behavior increased to the extent that multiple team members shared leadership, and that teams with shared leadership experienced less conflict, greater consensus, and higher intragroup trust and cohesion than teams without shared leadership. This study supports previous findings that shared leadership contributes to overall team functioning, and begins to delineate the extent to which team members may naturally share leadership.

The increased complexity of today’s work environment has made the need for soft skills, such as teamwork, communication, leadership, and problem solving, more salient than ever. Employers hire for these skills because it is increasingly the human resources that give organizations a competitive advantage. Therefore, academia must respond to these external stakeholder needs by reexamining curriculum in light of how degree programs, particularly in management, are preparing students for the demands of the workplace. We describe a curriculum redesign that used a backward design process to focus on developing the soft skills that employers need, focusing in particular on developing teamwork-related skill sets.

Shared leadership is an emergent team process defined by the distribution of leadership functions among multiple team members. Past empirical research on shared leadership has operationalized it as the overall quantity of leadership in the team, neglecting the essence of the conceptual definition – the distribution of leadership. In order to align the conceptual definition with an operational one, we examined shared leadership as network centralization using social network analysis. Using this operational definition, shared leadership was positively related to team performance. Additionally, longitudinal analyses revealed that shared leadership increased over time and was differentially related to antecedents of trust and team collectivism.