Sharing Leadership Often Enhances Team Performance

When my teachers assigned group projects in high school, most of us grumbled our dismay despite always finding that the result was much more impressive than anything we could have produced individually. That said, group work rarely occurred without one or two team members taking the reins on the project, leading the group to all-around better organization, distinct roles and responsibilities, and better grades.

This is known as shared leadership, when individuals dynamically and interactively influence one another to reach team and/or organizational goals. During this process, collective efficacy emerges – the group experiences increased confidence, believing themselves altogether capable of organizing and executing the necessary steps to achieve desired outcomes – impacting team outcomes and performance.

Unsurprisingly, shared leadership collectively offers teams many benefits. However, there has been little to no exploration of collective efficacy’s mediation on the effects and outcomes of shared leadership; more specifically, the extent to which team action processes (what it is that teams do) explain this phenomenon.

In “The effects of shared leadership and collective efficacy on team performance and learning: The mediating role of team action processes,” Adam Stoverink (University of Arkansas), Cristopher O.L.H. Porter (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), and Brittney Amber (Indiana University) aim to better understand how shared leadership impacts team performance, learning and effectiveness outcomes, collective efficacy beliefs, and engagement in action processes.

Greater Desire for Success

Without systematically exploring the learning outcomes of shared leadership, we ignore the reality that teams are commonly asked to share leadership to better move from one task to another, span unfamiliar boundaries, and continuously learn. But how do these expectations of shared leadership impact team members and their collective efficacy beliefs?

 Ultimately, team efficacy, as well as potency – a group’s belief in its effectiveness – fall under the umbrella of collective efficacy beliefs. They influence what teams choose to do, how they perform, their efforts, and resilience to failure. As greater collective efficacy emerges, specifically in effective work performance and functioning, team success increases.

Likewise, when team members share leadership responsibilities, they feel more impactful, powerful, and responsible in their organization and, thus, experience greater desire for success. This may be because individuals will naturally experience increased investment, as goals and duties in group environments become more personal.

 Additionally, team members who share leadership should also experience ease in learning, as it allows them to replicate, confirm, and support others’ perspectives, experiences, and doubts. In all, Stoverink and his coauthors believe that shared leadership causes greater good for the workplace and its members than harm.

What Is It that Teams Do?

Imagine stepping into a workspace to see employees grouped up, actively communicating to combine resources, knowledge, and skills. Due to this teamwork, the group completes all the project’s tasks and achieves their collective goals. As mentioned earlier, this is “what it is that teams do” when they are most involved in coordinating taskwork and working toward goals –   team action processes.

 These processes, along with two others – team transition and team interpersonal processes – broadly define members’ team activities to produce desired outcomes, having similar positive relationships with team performance.

More specifically, team action includes monitoring goal progress, systems, activities, and performance. Additionally, it involves backing up behavior – choosing to provide resources to other team members to help them obtain role-specific goals. Finally, this process also means coordinating activities.

Teams with high collective efficacy tend to engage more in these actions, because members will likely have more confidence and will help one another without fear of neglecting their own responsibilities. For example, as a team collectively works on a project with individual tasks to complete, one team member can aid another who is struggling with their task without falling behind on their own responsibilities.

Playing the most central role in explaining the influences on team effectiveness, shared leadership has several effects. Specifically, it increases team performance and decreases the time spent learning through collective efficacy and team action processes.

These findings indicate that teams experience more effectiveness with greater shared leadership. Via team action processes, team members have higher levels of collective efficacy beliefs, leading to higher team performance and less time spent learning. More specifically, shared leadership through team action and collective efficacy increases goal monitoring, systems monitoring, backing up behavior, and coordination.

Confident Accomplishments

W.L. Gore & Associates is a great example of what shared leadership looks like in a real-world setting. While the large global material sciences company employs 9,000 individuals, each of its offices are limited to 150 employees – supervisors are nonexistent in these environments. Rather, work is simply accepted by employees, not assigned.

 Evidently, this type of work environment increases teams’ collective efficacy, as well as produces the broader team outcome benefits that this study discovers and highlights.

 Likewise, workplaces can greatly benefit from managers and leaders allowing teams to self-lead when they possess adequate expertise or experience to do so. Through this, greater advantages beyond better team performance arise. For instance, members experience higher confidence about what they can do as a team and engagement in interdependent action, both of which further team learning and, thus, performance.

Some limitations exist in terms of incentivizing leadership sharing, as some leaders and managers may struggle to relinquish responsibilities and roles to team members. Stoverink and his coauthors urge the organizations and teams that crave the benefits of shared leadership to reevaluate structural and cultural features, develop psychologically safe environments for mistakes to be made, as well as “recognize the importance of trust in and patience with their teams.”

Like anything else, if done well, shared leadership can greatly benefit those who share it, those who are led by it, and those involved with the organization in which it is implemented.