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Shared leadership


Shared leadership is a leadership style that broadly distributes leadership responsibility, such that people within a team and organization lead each other. It has frequently been compared to horizontal leadership, distributed leadership, and collective leadership and is most contrasted with more traditional "vertical" or "hierarchical" leadership that resides predominantly with an individual instead of a group.

Shared leadership can be defined in a number of ways, but all definitions describe a similar phenomenon: team leadership by more than just an appointed leader. Below are examples from researchers in this field:

Shared leadership is also commonly thought of as the "serial emergence" of multiple leaders over the life of a team, stemming from interactions among team members in which at least one team member tries to influence other members or the team in general. While the definition clearly has several variants, they all make the fundamental distinction between shared leadership and more traditional notions of hierarchical leadership. As Pearce, Manz and Sims (2009) summarize, all definitions of shared leadership consistently include a "process of influence" that is "built upon more than just downward influence on subordinates or followers by an appointed or elected leader." Nearly all concepts of shared leadership entail the practice of "broadly sharing power and influence among a set of individuals rather than centralizing it in the hands of a single individual who acts in the clear role of a dominant superior." Therefore, shared leadership is an emergent team property of mutual influence and shared responsibility among team members, whereby they lead each other toward goal achievement. It differs from team leadership, team processes and team work in that shared leadership describes a set of cooperatively oriented cognitions, attitudes, and actions through which team members convert member inputs to team outputs.

Though a relatively new phenomenon in the literature, the concept of shared leadership can actually be traced back several centuries. In a 2002 paper, David Sally noted that shared leadership was present even in the early days of Republican Rome. Indeed, during those ancient times, Rome "had a successful system of co-leadership that lasted for over four centuries. This structure of co-leadership was so effective that it extended from the lower levels of the Roman magistracy to the very top position, that of consul." (Sally, 2002) Despite such early incantations of the practice, however, most of the scholarly work on leadership has still been predominantly focused on the study of leadership in its hierarchical form. Leadership is conceived around a single individual – the leader – and how that person inspires, entices, commands, cajoles and controls followers. Research on shared leadership instead departs from the notion that leadership may well be studied as a collective phenomenon, as activities involving several individuals beyond the formally appointed manager.


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