Shared leadership is a team leadership approach where influence and power are distributed among team members, rather than concentrated in a single appointed leader. It involves team members leading one another towards achieving shared goals through providing feedback that motivates and influences the team's direction. Shared leadership can be measured through members rating each other's leadership behaviors and through social network analysis to assess patterns of influential relationships. Potential advantages include united responsibility, employee involvement in decisions, and increased creativity and satisfaction, while disadvantages include difficulty executing and requiring significant changes to organizational structure and decision-making.
2. Shared Leadership
Definition: Team leadership by more than only the
appointed leader
• Sharing power and influence among a set of individuals
• Upward or downward hierarchical influence
• Decentralized management
• Objective is to lead one another to the achievement of
group’s goals
3. Requirements of Shared
Leadership
1. Team members must be willing to provide
feedback to the team in a way that influences
and motivates the direction of the group.
2. The team must overall be willing to accept and
trust in the feedback provided by other team
members.
4. Measuring Shared Leadership
Ratings of the Team's
Collective Leadership Behavior
• Leader behavior questionnaires
• Members complete these for the
leader and for all other team
members
• Assesses existence and
frequency of different leadership
behaviors
Social network analysis
(SNA)
• Assess the patterns of
connections and relationships
that emerge in a team
• Tie: relationship that occurs
when one team member
perceives another as having
leadership influence on the team
• Network Density: proportion of
actual ties to all potential ties
• Centralization Analysis: assess
the distribution and quantity of
leadership
5. +/- of Shared Leadership
Advantages
• United responsibility
• Employee involvement
with decision making process
• Facilitates:
• Staff input
• Creativity
• Sense of worth
• High self-esteem
• Job satisfaction
• Employee empowerment
Disadvantages
• Hard to execute
• Changes organization’s structure,
relationships and decisions on every
level
• Requires massive dedication and
cautious preparation
• Mixed results of this leadership
style’s efficiency
