Temporal dynamics of shared leadership

Abstract

Shared leadership is conceptualized as a dynamic team state, yet surprisingly most research is based on cross-sectional designs. Additionally, as prior studies mostly focused on performance-enhancing effects of shared leadership, little is known about consequences for team members’ work-related well-being. We expand the job demands-resources perspective to build a dynamic model of shared leadership as a team resource that affects team members’ well-being and emotional exhaustion. Furthermore, we investigate the interplay between shared leadership and team workload. We applied a daily diary study over five consecutive working days with data from 265 team members nested in 77 teams. As hypothesized, dynamic changes in shared leadership were associated with an increase in collective member well-being and a reduction of emotional exhaustion over time. Further, team workload interacted with shared leadership so that high team workload dynamics were associated with dynamics changes in collective emotional exhaustion when shared leadership dynamics were low. However, collective member well-being was not affected by such an interaction effect. These findings contribute a temporal perspective to shared leadership as a dynamic team state, establish shared leadership as an important team resource, and address the missing link between the sharing of leadership functions and collective member well-being.

Transnational Education Programme Leadership in Four Business Schools in Malaysia

“…There was also a much greater sense of togetherness or shared ownership among the homegrown programme teams. This finding supports the idea that distributed leadership is a product of the collective position of formal leadership and leadership by all individuals in a team (Hernandez et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2014;Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017) or a dynamic team state (Klasmeier et al, 2020). In the survey, 74.0 percent of homegrown programme respondents agreed that members of the PMT do make a difference, compared with only 49.1 percent of the TNE programme respondents.…”

“…The authors also suggest that distributed leadership is essential to make progress effectively as a collective entity. In this sense, leadership becomes "a dynamic team state" (Klasmeier et al, 2020) that could be continuously created from communication and cooperation among all members (Han et al, 2021).…”