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

  • Jinlong Zhu
    School of Business Renmin University of China Beijing China
  • Zhenyu Liao
    Olin Business School Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis Missouri U.S.A.
  • Kai Chi Yam
    Department of Management and Organization National University of Singapore Singapore
  • Russell E. Johnson
    Department of Management Michigan State University East Lansing Michigan U.S.A.

Abstract

<jats:title>Summary</jats:title><jats:p>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) conceptually 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.</jats:p>

Journal

Citations (2)*help

See more

Report a problem

Back to top