Shared leadership: A state‐of‐the‐art review and future research agenda

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2296
• Author: Russell E. Johnson,Kai Chi Yam,Zhenyu Liao,Jinlong Zhu
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018

THE JOB ANNUAL REVIEW

Shared leadership: A state‐of‐the‐art review and future

research agenda

Jinlong Zhu

1

*|Zhenyu Liao

2

*|Kai Chi Yam

3

|Russell E. Johnson

4

1

School of Business, Renmin University of

China, Beijing, China

2

Olin Business School, Washington University

in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.

3

Department of Management and

Organization, National University of

Singapore, Singapore

4

Department of Management, Michigan State

University, East Lansing, Michigan, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Jinlong Zhu, School of Business, Renmin

University of China, No. 59 Zhongguancun

Street, Beijing 100872, P.R. China.

Email: zhujinlong@rmbs.ruc.edu.cn

Zhenyu Liao, Olin Business School,

Washington University in St. Louis. One

Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.

Email: z.liao@wustl.edu

Funding information

Singapore Ministry of Education Research

Grant Academic Research Fund Tier 1, Grant/

Award Number: R‐317‐000‐132‐115;

Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong

Special Administrative Region, China, Grant/

Award Number: GRF Project Code ‐LU

13500817

Summary

The traditional “great man”approaches to leadership emphasize qualities of individual

leaders for leadership success. In contrast, a rapidly growing body of research has

started to examine shared leadership, which is broadly defined as an emergent team

phenomenon whereby leadership roles and influence are distributed among team

members. Despite the progress, however, the extant literature on shared leadership

has been fragmented with a variety of conceptualizations and operationalizations.

This has resulted in little consensus regarding a suitable overarching theoretical

framework and has undermined developing knowledge in this research domain. To

redress these problems, we provide a comprehensive review of the growing literature

of shared leadership by (a) clarifying the definition of shared leadership; (b) conceptu-

ally disentangling shared leadership from other theoretically overlapping constructs;

(c) addressing measurement issues; and (d) developing an integrative framework of

the antecedents, proximal and distal consequences, and boundary conditions of

shared leadership. We end our review by highlighting several new avenues for future

research.

KEYWORDS

framework, measurement, review, shared leadership, teams

1|INTRODUCTION

Increasingly, work teams distribute functional leadership roles to

members in areas in which those members have requisite talent

(Goldsmith, 2010; Pearce, 2004; D. Wang, Waldman, & Zhang,

2014). Recognizing this trend, leadership scholars have started to shift

their focus from a top‐down vertical influence process to a horizontal

and shared leading process among team members (Carson, Tesluk, &

Marrone, 2007; Denis, Langley, & Sergi, 2012; Lord, Day, Zaccaro,

Avolio, & Eagly, 2017). Shared leadership, defined as an emergent team

phenomenon whereby leadership roles and influence are distributed

among team members (Carson et al., 2007), has received considerable

attention in an array of academic disciplines, including industrial and

organizational psychology, organizational behavior, strategic manage-

ment, and entrepreneurship. Differing from other leadership theories

that focus on the leadership role of formal appointed leaders, shared

leadership highlights the agentic role of team members in team leading

processes (Carson et al., 2007; Nicolaides et al., 2014; Pearce &

Conger, 2003). In particular, accumulated evidence suggests that

shared leadership plays a promising role in increasing team effective-

ness (e.g., O'Toole, Galbraith, & Lawler, 2002; Pearce, Manz, & Sims

Jr, 2009; D. Wang et al., 2014). As such, shared leadership is an

intriguing new field that enriches our understanding of leadership

and shifts the leadership paradigm from viewing leadership as a prop-

erty of the individual to viewing leadership as a property of the collec-

tive (Cullen‐Lester & Yammarino, 2016).

Although research on shared leadership has burgeoned recently,

the extant literature is fragmented in two important ways. First,

various definitions and corresponding measures across studies lead

to low consensus in shared leadership research. Indeed, D'Innocenzo,

Mathieu, and Kukenberger (2016, p. 1965) noted that “the literature

has become quite disjointed with a proliferation of nomenclature

*

Jinlong Zhu and Zhenyu Liao share first authorship on this work.

Received: 30 November 2016 Revised: 14 April 2018 Accepted: 30 April 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2296

834 Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2018;39:834–852.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

and conceptualizations.”To date, there is no unified conceptualization

regarding what shared leadership is and no unified theoretical frame-

work that explains the emergence and consequences of shared leader-

ship. Researchers have proposed several definitions, resulting in

different interpretations of shared leadership and the corresponding

measures (Carson et al., 2007; Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2004;

D'Innocenzo et al., 2016; Nicolaides et al., 2014; D. Wang et al.,

2014). For example, some definitions focus on the number of people

involved in leadership activities to distinguish shared leadership with

traditional leadership. These definitions highlight the collective

engagement in team leadership in contrast with the engagement of a

single leader (e.g., Ensley, Hmieleski, & Pearce, 2006). Some definitions

focus on the source of leadership influence. Specifically, shared lead-

ership involves horizontal, lateral influence among team members,

which is in contrast with the traditional top‐down leadership influence

derived from a formal position with entitled power and status (e.g.,

Pearce & Sims, 2002). Accordingly, researchers operationalized shared

leadership distinctively. Some of them focus on measuring the extent

to which team members collectively engage in leadership behaviors

(e.g., Avolio, Sivasubramaniam, Murry, Jung, & Garger, 2003; Pearce

& Ensley, 2004), while others intend to capture the extent to which

leadership is decentralized (e.g., Mehra, Smith, Dixon, & Robertson,

2006). Such various definitions and measures likely cause a significant

difference in the effect size that shared leadership has on the same

team outcome across studies (D'Innocenzo et al., 2016). Hoch and

Kozlowski (2014, p. 393) therefore pointed out that “a challenge fac-

ing researchers is determining how to measure shared leadership.”

Second, although some researchers have quantitatively reviewed

extant studies on shared leadership (e.g., D'Innocenzo et al., 2016;

Nicolaides et al., 2014; D. Wang et al., 2014), our knowledge of the

antecedents, consequences, and boundary conditions of shared lead-

ership remains fragmented due to the lack of an overarching frame-

work that depicts the general stream of research on shared

leadership. The approach of meta‐analysis is limited in that it only con-

siders variables that have been examined in multiple samples. To date,

meta‐analyses (e.g., D'Innocenzo et al., 2016; Nicolaides et al., 2014;

D. Wang et al., 2014) have been limited to examining the relationship

of shared leadership with a single outcome—team performance—and,

in one case (Nicolaides et al., 2014), a single mediating mechanism of

this relation—team confidence. Contrary to this narrow focus, though,

dozens of studies on shared leadership have been conducted, and

many of them include unique outcomes and mediators. Because

shared leadership research is still emerging and a substantial body of

empirical research has investigated various antecedents and conse-

quences of shared leadership sporadically, a comprehensive qualitative

review is valuable for capturing this growing area of research more

effectively and for identifying important research directions. Despite

of some brief qualitative summaries of shared leadership embeded in

broader leadership reviews (e.g., Avolio, Walumbwa, & Weber, 2009;

Day et al., 2004; Denis et al., 2012; Lord et al., 2017; Yammarino,

Salas, Serban, Shirreffs, & Shuffler, 2012), so far, we still lack a com-

prehensive review that synthesizes the factors that contribute to

how shared leadership emerges, why and how shared leadership influ-

ences team processes, and what boundary conditions shape the

effects of shared leadership.

With the aim of developing an agenda for future research, we pro-

vide a thorough qualitative review of shared leadership research. By

doing so, we contribute to the development of shared leadership

research in four important ways. First, given the numerous definitions

of shared leadership (Carson et al., 2007; Yammarino et al., 2012), we

review shared leadership definitions, identify the developmental

history and key characteristics of shared leadership, and distinguish

it from other theoretically overlapping leadership constructs such as

emergent leadership, self‐leadership, empowering leadership, partici-

pative leadership, and team leadership. Building on this work, we

endeavor to reduce current confusion regarding the shared leadership

construct and provide suggestions for its conceptualization. Second,

by reviewing the existing measures of shared leadership and evaluat-

ing their respective strengths and weaknesses, we recommend some

theoretically coherent measures for future empirical research. Third,

we present an overarching framework that summarizes the anteced-

ents, proximal and distal consequences, and boundary conditions of

shared leadership, noting issues such as theoretical perspectives and

types of teams. Such a comprehensive framework has both theoretical

and empirical significance because it provides a roadmap of where we

are and where to start from for the advancement of shared leadership

research. Fourth, we discuss insights from our review and systemati-

cally propose a series of potential future research directions.

2|UNDERSTANDING AND DEFINING

SHARED LEADERSHIP

Historically, researchers have conceptualized leadership as a down-

ward hierarchical influence process derived from a single individual

within work teams—the formal leader. Conventional leadership

research has mostly considered how one leader influences followers

in a team or organization (Bass & Bass, 2008; Bolden, 2011; Pearce

& Conger, 2003). This hierarchical, leader‐centric paradigm has been

a prominent feature in the leadership literature for many decades

(Bass & Bass, 2008; Pearce, Hoch, Jeppesen, & Wegge, 2010).

Nevertheless, since the 1990s,

1

a growing number of scholars have

challenged the conventional conceptualization of leadership by argu-

ing that leadership can also be shared among members of a group

(Carson et al., 2007; Pearce & Sims, 2002). With this approach to team

leadership, team members exert leadership influence and provide

guidance to one another as needed (Carson et al., 2007). For example,

team members skilled in a specialized area might engage in leadership

behavior in that domain, while adopting the role of follower in other

domains (Manz, Skaggs, Pearce, & Wassenaar, 2015; Meuser et al.,

2016).

2.1 |Definitions of shared leadership

As shown inTable 1, shared leadership has been conceptualized in dif-

ferent ways (e.g., Carson et al., 2007; Nicolaides et al., 2014; Pearce &

1

Although the concept of shared leadership is rooted in earlier works (see

Follett, 1924; Gibb, 1954; Katz & Kahn, 1978), this perspective has become

more prominent in contemporary leadership theories and research from the

mid‐1990s onward (Avolio et al., 1996; Seers, 1996).

ZHU ET AL.835