Empirical analysis of shared leadership promotion and team creativity: An adaptive leadership perspective

• Author: Russell E. Johnson,Hongwei Wang,Ahsan Ali
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2437

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Empirical analysis of shared leadership promotion and team

creativity: An adaptive leadership perspective

Ahsan Ali

1

| Hongwei Wang

1

| Russell E. Johnson

2

1

School of Economics and Management,

Tongji University, Shanghai, China

2

Department of Management, Broad College

of Business, Michigan State University, East

Lansing, MI, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Ahsan Ali, School of Economics and

Management, Tongji University, Shanghai,

200092, China.

Email: ahsanali@mail.ustc.edu.cn

Funding information

Fundamental Research Funds for the Central

Universities; Innovation Fund for University

Production, Education and Research from

China's Ministry of Education, Grant/Award

Number: 2019J01012; Natural Science

Foundation of China, Grant/Award Number:

71771177

Summary

Promoting shared leadership in teams and enhancing team creativity is aided by com-

plementarity between leader and team member characteristics. We integrate insights

from social learning theory and dominance complementarity perspective with the

team leadership and creativity literature to explore the facilitating role of formal par-

ticipative leadership for enhancing team creativity indirectly by promoting shared

leadership. The relationships among formal participative leadership, shared leader-

ship, and team creativity are bounded by team voice behavior and team creative effi-

cacy. To test our theoretical model, we collected multisource and multiwave survey

data from 382 members of 73 teams. Results revealed a significant positive relation-

ship of participative leadership with shared leadership in teams, which in turn was

positively associated with team creativity. Team voice behavior and team creative

efficacy moderated these relationships, respectively, by strengthening the positive

relationships. We discuss the theoretical contributions, practical implications, and

future directions of our findings.

KEYWORDS

participative leadership, shared leadership, team creative efficacy, team creativity, team voice

behavior

1|INTRODUCTION

Team leadership plays a crucial role in managing team performance

(Pearce, Yoo, & Alavi, 2003), yet a review of the literature reveals that

leadership research is dominated by a focus on formal (i.e., top-down

and hierarchical) leadership whereas research on team leadership

remains relatively underdeveloped (Lord, Day, Zaccaro, Avolio, &

Eagly, 2017; Scott-Young, Georgy, & Grisinger, 2019). Given that

teams are widely employed at work (Scott-Young et al., 2019), this

lack of attention is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate because collec-

tive forms of leadership are believed to contribute to team perfor-

mance above and beyond formal individual leadership (Day &

Harrison, 2007; Pearce, Conger, & Locke, 2008). For example, shared

leadership, a type of collective team leadership involving dynamic

shared influence among individual group members aimed to achieve

collective team goals (Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007), has been

found to have consistent positive effects on a number of team out-

comes, including learning (Liu, Hu, Li, Wang, & Lin, 2014), perfor-

mance (Perry, Pearce, & Sims, 1999), creativity (Peter, Braun, &

Frey, 2015), and innovation (Hoch, 2013).

Despite these encouraging findings from initial research on

shared leadership, a recent review by Zhu, Liao, Yam, and John-

son (2018) highlighted some limitations with this literature. Chief

among them includes a limited understanding of the antecedents of

shared leadership and of the moderators that constrain its effective-

ness in teams. We address these concerns in the current study by

identifying a predictor of shared leadership and under what conditions

it relates to creative performance in teams. With regard to its predic-

tion, shared leadership often coincides with formal hierarchical leader-

ship (Cullen-Lester, Maupin, & Carter, 2017; Pearce et al., 2008), and

formal leadership is in fact believed to facilitate and legitimate the

emergence of shared leadership in teams (Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014). If

Received: 25 January 2019 Revised: 20 February 2020 Accepted: 22 February 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2437

J Organ Behav. 2020;41:405–423. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 405

so, then this begs the question of “What type of formal hierarchical

leadership contributes to shared leadership?”According to DeRue and

Ashford (2010), shared leadership emerges when team members

accept the leadership role and recognize the leadership role of other

team members. According to social learning theory (Bandura, 1977),

when deciding whether to accept the leadership role and recognize

the leadership of others, followers look to formal leaders as models to

understand what behavior is appropriate in the team. The acceptance

and recognition of one's own and other members' leadership roles are

more likely to occur in teams where the formal leader models behav-

iors that actively involve followers in leadership activities and decision

making. Such an approach parallels a style called participative leader-

ship, which entails delegating authority to followers and involving

them in leadership activities in order to solve problems and achieve

team goals (Armenakis, Harris, & Mossholder, 1993; Koopman &

Wierdsma, 1998; Miao, Newman, & Huang, 2014). Thus, we draw on

social learning theory to examine participative leadership as a poten-

tial antecedent of shared leadership because participative leadership

is the most salient and direct leadership style that models leadership

delegation and increases followers' interest in leadership roles (Miao,

Newman, Schwarz, & Xu, 2013).

With regard to moderating conditions, one of the assumptions of

social learning theory is that interactions between environmental

stimuli and characteristics of the focal actor or team predict learning

effectiveness (Bandura, 1978; Ginter & White, 1982; Wellman

et al., 2019). Accordingly, although a leader can provide the team with

the opportunity to exhibit shared leadership by modeling participative

behaviors, whether or not shared leadership is realized depends upon

team characteristics (Chiu, Owens, & Tesluk, 2016). To identify a rele-

vant team characteristic, an integration of dominance complementar-

ity theory (Carson, 1969; Kiesler, 1983) with social learning theory

suggests that social learning processes of shared leadership and team

creativity are contingent upon complementarity team characteristics.

In some teams, members are disposed to speak up, offer recommen-

dations, and encourage other members to get involved with issues

that affect team performance, which reflects high team voice behavior

(Chen & Hou, 2016). Teams with high voice behavior provides a com-

plementary context in which members are open to opportunities to

participate and will be more likely to accept and recognize their own

and others' leadership roles when those opportunities are made avail-

able to them. Thus, we position team voice behavior as a key modera-

tor that compliments participative leadership and strengthens its

impact on promoting shared leadership.

Once shared leadership has emerged in the team though,

improved team effectiveness is not necessarily guaranteed (Boies,

Lvina, & Martens, 2011). Consistent with a central tenet of social

learning theory (Bandura, 1977), for the team to leverage its shared

leadership to enhance team creativity requires that the team has high

efficacy for creative pursuits. In other words, complementarity

between characteristics of the team (creative efficacy) and the envi-

ronment (creativity task demands) is needed. Team members must

feel confident about their knowledge and skills for producing creative

outputs in order to channel their dynamic shared influence toward

achieving team creativity goals. Without this confidence, members are

unlikely to exchange creative ideas with one another owing to the

fear of being ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed (Gong, Huang, &

Farh, 2009; Shin & Eom, 2014). We therefore propose that team crea-

tive efficacy is a key moderator of the relationship between shared

leadership and team creativity performance.

Our study, which adopted a social network measure of shared

leadership and highlights critical antecedents and moderating factors

of shared leadership, contributes to the leadership and creativity liter-

atures in the following ways. First, given the need for ongoing support

from formal leadership to facilitate shared leadership in teams

(Hoch, 2013), we answer calls (Chiu et al., 2016) to explore the role of

participative leadership as a predictor of shared leadership. By doing

so, we empirically verify Pearce's (2004) notion of the coexistence of

formal leadership and shared leadership in teams and clarify how

these two types of leadership are related. Second, on the basis of our

integration of social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) and dominance

complementarity theory (Carson, 1969; Kiesler, 1983), we provide a

comprehensive understanding of how the complementarity of team

leadership and team characteristics can foster shared leadership in

teams. Doing so answers calls to further investigate the contributions

of followers (as opposed solely to the contributions of leaders) to

shared leadership in teams (Sweeney, Clarke, & Higgs, 2018; Zhu

et al., 2018). Third, because moderating conditions of shared leader-

ship have been overlooked to date, which Zhu et al. (2018)

admonished about in their recent review, our theorizing identifies an

important team characteristic––team voice behavior––that comple-

ments the effects of formal participative leadership on shared leader-

ship. Finally, through linking shared leadership with creativity and

examining the moderating effect of team creative efficacy, our study

answers recent calls (Hughes, Lee, Tian, Newman, & Legood, 2018) to

decipher mechanisms through which leader–follower interactions

impact creativity in teams. Our model of the interplay of participative

leadership, team attributes, and shared leadership for promoting crea-

tivity in teams is illustrated in Figure 1.

2|THEORY AND HYPOTHESIS

DEVELOPMENT

2.1 |Shared leadership

Since the concept of shared leadership was first introduced by

Gibb (1954), studies have defined it in numerous ways (see Table 1 for

examples and Zhu et al., 2018, for a review). Following the consistent

adoptability by recent studies and relevancy to our conceptualization,

we define shared leadership as a dynamic, interactive influence pro-

cess among group members for which the objective is to lead one

another to the achievement of team goals (Pearce et al., 2003). Shared

leadership is different from formal leadership such that formal leader-

ship stems from a formally appointed leader of a team and it theoreti-

cally relies on the idea of vertical interaction among one leader and a

group of followers. In contrast, shared leadership involves distributed

406 ALI ET AL.