Leadership Research Summary:
- Shared leadership is not only about individual team members engaging in leadership, but also about team members adopting the complementary follower role. However, the question of what enables team members to fill in each of these roles and the corresponding influence of formal leaders have remained largely unexplored. Using a social network perspective allows us to predict both leadership and followership ties between team members based on considerations of implicit leadership and followership theories. From this social information processing perspective, researchers identify individual team members’ political skill and the formal leaders’ empowering leadership as important qualities that facilitate the adoption of each the leader and the follower role. Results from a social network analysis in a R&D department with 305 realized leadership ties support most of our hypotheses
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- The study’s findings contribute to the extant theoretical understanding of shared leadership. Most of the existing literature investigates antecedents of shared leadership at the aggregate (i.e., team) level; our analysis extends this prior knowledge to the within-team processes that constitute shared leadership. In doing so, we go beyond prior research on shared and emergent leadership by setting our study at the intersection between the two literatures. In particular, we account for the fact that shared leadership requires both leader and follower roles (DeRue and Ashford, 2010), which raises the question of what drives team members’ engagement and acceptance of one another in each of these roles. This question has only scarcely been tackled in the extant literature.
- The researcher’s choice of political skill was informed by research on ILTs and IFTs (Lord et al., 2020). From this perspective, we looked for a variable that allows team members to engage in both, prototypical leader and follower behaviors. The study’s findings support political skill as an important variable that allows team members to navigate both sides of the within-team processes of shared leadership. Thus, the study contributes to the shared leadership literature by providing a deeper understanding of individuals’ contribution to the different requirements of shared leadership. Moreover, it adds to the emergent leadership literature, which to date has not considered social skills such as political abilities (Acton et al., 2019), but rather focused on individual abilities. Furthermore, our approach and findings contribute to the political skill literature by positioning the concept within the network leadership literature (Scott et al., 2018) and thus suggesting a new line of research beyond the impact of political skill on formal leaders’ emergence and effectiveness (Kimura, 2015).
- With regard to the role of formal leadership, the within-team level of analysis offers a new perspective on the influence of empowering formal leadership on shared leadership. While extant research showed a direct influence of empowering formal leadership on shared leadership at the team level (Hoch, 2013; Jain and Jeppesen, 2014; Fausing et al., 2015), researchers have pointed out the necessity to expanded upon individual abilities by including contextual variables (Wellman et al., 2019; Hanna et al., 2021). By following this call, we provide a within-team perspective that allows for a more fine-grained analysis of the influence of empowering formal leadership, thereby considering it as a moderator of the relationship between individual team members’ political skill and the assumption of leader and follower roles. Thus, the shift in the level of analysis allows us to provide a refined explanation for the effectiveness of empowering formal leadership in a team context.
- Empowering formal leadership moderates the relationship between political skill and being relied on for leadership. Our results suggest that political skill is clearly related to being relied on for leadership by other team members when empowering formal leadership is high, while it seems to have little impact when empowering formal leadership is low. This pattern suggests that empowering formal leadership facilitates an environment which makes it easy for politically skilled team members to be relied on by others for leadership, i.e., supports these team members in leading others by making use of their political skills. As for relying on others for leadership, we were not able to obtain robust empirical results that are consistent both with and without considering additional theoretically meaningful control variables. Therefore, the findings in the analysis can at best be considered as first tentative evidence that high levels of political skill might be more important to rely on others for leadership when empowering leadership is low. Overall, our findings indicate that political skill is an important team member quality, which allows the politically skilled individual to take advantage of empowering formal leadership in gaining their fellow team members’ reliance on their leadership influences.
- The study’s patterns of findings on the joint influence of individual team members’ skills and empowering leadership also resonates with more general findings showing empowering leadership to facilitate intra-team coordination processes. For example, Carmeli et al. (2011) found that the empowering leadership by the CEO facilitates relevant team coordination processes (i.e., behavioral integration) in top management teams. Further, Oedzes et al. (2019) showed a dampening effect of empowering leadership on the negative relationship between informal hierarchies and team creativity. The findings also add to reasoning brought forward by Wellman et al. (2019) who argue that just providing freedom via laissez-faire leadership does not encourage team members to take up the role of informal leaders. Rather, these authors propose that a motivational component in the sense of active role modeling is required to encourage leadership emergence. The study’s findings are in line with these arguments. However, these studies still focus on the team level. To fully understand the within-team processes of shared leadership—as considered in the study’s—and the impact of team members’ characteristics as well as formal leadership influences, further research is required which includes a variety of additional team member characteristics and formal leadership behaviors.
- The study’s research is of high practical relevance as practitioners can learn from our study how to foster shared leadership in their organizations. First, based on the findings, they might be well-advised to select employees for their teams based on their political skill and/or to train them to fully develop their political skill. Ferris et al. (2000) have already shown how individuals’ political skill can be trained successfully. Second, our findings on the moderating role of empowering formal leadership give practitioners a better understanding of how formal leaders can at least partially enable shared leadership processes in their teams. Therefore, organizations should focus on including empowering leadership into their formal leadership trainings to facilitate shared leadership in the leaders’ teams. First evidence on the trainability of empowering leadership is already available, for example, from Lorinkova et al. (2013).