An Exploration of Shared Leadership Emergence in Project Teams: A Form and Functional Analysis

Shared leadership refers to an emergent team property whereby leadership is distributed among team members rather than focused on a single designated leader. In general, research has found positive relationships between shared leadership and performance however, the construct of shared leadership itself remains elusive. Specifically, there has been no research examining the process by which individuals engage in shared leadership or how this process may change over time as a function of external demands. Accordingly, I conduct a stratified random sample, quasi-experimental design to test the influence of external pressures on the development of a shared leadership structure. First, I predict how multiple individuals emerge into leadership roles based on general and specific predictors of leadership functions in context within project teams. Using these various leadership indicators across functions, I test a predictive algorithm using 221 observations of individuals who are enrolled in an undergraduate-level strategy course at a large university in the Northeast United States. Second, I compute predictive scores to determine the leader role occupancy of team members and respective team leadership structures using hierarchical linear modeling techniques. Using a sample of 79 teams, predicted leadership models are compared with the observed leadership structure over time under conditions of a leadership design intervention. Changes in leadership structure as a function of the intervention and team performance levels are examined. Implications for research and practice are discussed