Shared leadership in teams ::exploring the effect of relational identification on in-role performance

Leading others is generally accepted as a process by which an individual influences another individual (or collective) to exert effort in reaching organizational goals (Northouse, 2010) . As such, leading others within organizations does not have to be tied to any particular organizational or hierarchal position to employ such influence (Wheelan & Johnston, 1996; Yukl, 2013) . In addition, scholars have also untethered leadership from the notion wherein a single leader influences others to the notion of shared or distributed leadership wherein mutual influence is paramount (Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007; Hernandez, Eberly, Avolio, & Johnson, 2011; Sergi, Denis, & Langley, 2012) . A key question then becomes how does this mu tual influence develop and translate into organizationally - relevant behavior? While there are multiple paths to answer this question, scholars have recently explored one particular path – identity – wherein shared identity and/or identification creates mut ual influence and subsequent organizationally - relevant behaviors (DeRue & Ashford, 2010; Sluss & Ashforth, 2007) . Our study , therefore, focuses on how co - worker dyads mutually influence each other and how this mutual influence translates to in - role performance. More specifically, we investigated how sales dyad s ’ relational identification (i.e. the extent to which the sales dyad’s relation ship is self - defining; Sluss & Ash forth, 2007 ) engenders a sense of balanced contribution and how balanced contribution leads to key performance indicators (in our case, visits to client sites)