Comparative Study of Team Characteristics under Shared Leadership in Large and Small companies in IT Industry in India

Abstract

Shared Leadership, a prevalent leadership variant associated with industries where job is of interdependent nature and involves complex interplay of multidisciplinary experts. It has been explored with a view to compare team characteristics in big and small IT organisations. The sample includes 154 team members selected from 37 IT companies in India. The data is collected through standardised questionnaire on shared leadership. This paper aims at comparing the teams in large and small IT organisations and companies with regard to the few chosen characteristics in the context of shared leadership. Variance analysis is undertaken to explore on which of the team characteristics the big and small IT organisations differ while correlational analysis has been used to find out which of the team characteristics associate with each other. The findings reveal that there is difference in approach of teams in big and small IT organisations in terms of few characteristics while with respect to other team characteristics undertaken for study, the big and small IT organisations show nearly similar approach. The associational analysis reveals that team characteristics like multidisciplinary contribution, technical complexity, distributed actions, on one hand and characteristics like reciprocal dependency, decision making opportunity, member feedback, consensual working and synchronised plans on the other show a high correlation which signifies that these team characteristics compliment and supplement each other and thus resulting in strengthening and reinforcing each other. The inter characteristics variations and associations bring to light several scenarios which are of useful implications to the leaders and managers. The paper also provides for a model explaining the functioning of the team characteristics leading to efficient working of shared leadership.