Leadership Research Summary:
- Implementing innovation laboratories to leverage intrapreneurship are an increasingly popular organizational practice. A typical feature in these creative environments are semi-autonomous teams in which multiple members collectively exert leadership influence, thereby challenging traditional command-and-control conceptions of leadership. An extensive body of research on the team-centric concept of shared leadership has recognized the potential for pluralized leadership structures in enhancing team effectiveness; however, little empirical work has been conducted in organizational contexts in which creativity is key.
- This study set out to explore antecedents of shared leadership and its influence on team creativity in an innovation lab. Building on extant shared leadership and innovation research, the study proposes that antecedents are customary to creative teamwork, that is, experimental culture, task reflexivity, and voice. Multisource data were collected from 104 team members and 49 evaluations of 29 coaches nested in 21 teams working in a prototypical innovation lab. Researchers identify factors specific to creative teamwork that facilitate the emergence of shared leadership by providing room for experimentation, encouraging team members to speak up in the creative process, and cultivating a reflective application of entrepreneurial thinking. The study provides specific exemplary activities for innovation lab teams to increase levels of shared leadership.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- This study bears relevance for the management of innovation labs insofar as the presented findings implicate the opportunity to facilitate the emergence of team shared leadership in a creative context. The team-centric nature inherent to the many incarnations of increasingly popular innovation labs (e.g., intrapreneurial support structures, such as digital labs, accelerators, and incubators) calls for more evidence-informed insights on how present-day teams work in these novel contexts (Ahuja, 2019). In particular, the collective engagement in task- and situation-specific intrapreneurial activities requires team members to share leadership behaviors in lieu of a formal, vertical team leader.
- Innovation lab and team managers, therefore, should encourage a team culture that allows for the emergence of shared leadership to let teams’ maneuver’ intrapreneurial activities with increased autonomy in a context supportive to innovation (Van de Ven, 2017). This can be achieved by providing room for experimentation, encouraging team members to speak up in the process, and cultivating a reflective application of entrepreneurial thinking. In the following Table 6, researchers build upon and extend previous work in entrepreneurship education (Groeger and Schweitzer, 2020) to make suggestions about commendable objectives associated with learning about antecedents of shared leadership and describe how these objectives could be facilitated via specific learning and coaching activities. The study proposes this as a starting point toward better managing teams in innovation lab settings.
- Thus far, research on the phenomenon of shared leadership has provided few insights on how it materializes in creative environments. Increasingly, popular innovation labs represent a setting in which shared leadership in teams coincides with the application of a collaborative creative problem-solving approach. Building on extant shared leadership and innovation research, we proposed potential antecedents customary to creative teamwork. The study’s results demonstrate that experimental culture, task reflexivity, and voice are positively associated with shared leadership. Further research on potential contextual conditions using larger samples is required to investigate the influence of shared leadership on team creativity. In conclusion, this study can inform the management of team-based innovation labs by suggesting how to facilitate shared leadership, specifically in creative teamwork, where people are at the heart of successful innovation initiatives.
Table 6
