The Antecedents and Outcomes of Shared Leadership: A Conceptual Review

Leadership studies have traditionally focused on formally assigned hierarchical leaders. The explosion of knowledge work has necessitated a shift toward shared leadership, expanding the investigation of leadership behaviors to all team members. Effective shared leadership helps teams become self-directed, autonomous, and better able to succeed in non-routine tasks. This conceptual review identifies the antecedents and outcomes of shared leadership to guide research and practice, increasing our understanding of the impact supervisors, team dynamics, individual attitudes and characteristics, and context have on the emergence of shared leadership and its effect on team performance. Shared leadership is vital for teams with inexperienced members or high task variety because it enables informal learning. Future research should determine whether team trust predicts or results from shared leadership, or both. Shared leadership will become increasingly important as robots and artificial intelligence replace humans in routine tasks, because the work left will involve novel, non-routine problems.