Abstract
Managerial shared leadership is a practice that goes beyond traditional ways of organising leadership functions. It is an organisational phenomenon where a few individuals share responsibility for the tasks of a managerial position. This paper reviews 67 empirical papers published in scientific journals. The review covers 55 years (1965–2019). The aim is to contribute knowledge about managerial shared leadership as a research field and offer some relevant theoretical concepts. No review to date has specifically focused on managerial shared leadership, and this paper intends to close this knowledge gap. The paper details the start of managerial shared leadership as a research field, presents a bibliometric analysis and the methodological approaches used, and describes the structural characteristics of managerial shared leadership. The paper includes a thematic content analysis of necessary and enabling antecedents and outcomes. Historically, the imprecise use of concepts has hampered managerial shared leadership’s development into a cohesive research field, so this paper develops and uses theoretical concepts to form a theoretical construct for the entire field. This construct is briefly discussed in relation to general shared leadership theory and critical leadership studies. In practice, managerial shared leadership may provide leadership solutions where there is an imbalance between demands and resources while managing complex situations.
Highlights
Managerial shared leadership is a practice that goes beyond traditional, singular ways of organising leadership functions
With this paper’s 55-year perspective, we touch upon contemporary managerial history, and the results we present begin by depicting the start of managerial shared leadership as a research field
The result sections above show that the research field of managerial shared leadership exists and how it has been studied over 55 years
Summary
Leadership (Denis et al, 2012; O’Toole et al, 2002). As a research field, managerial shared leadership continues to be studied empirically in various contexts, yet still has not developed into a recognised research field. Within the literature about both shared leadership (Carson et al, 2007; Pearce and Conger, 2003) and distributed leadership (Spillane et al, 2008; Gronn, 2002), managerial shared leadership focuses on empirical situations in which two, three or more individuals conjointly work as leaders (Denis et al, 2012). They share leadership within the frame of a managerial position and distribute leadership tasks and power within the sharing constellation. Managerial shared leadership occurs within a constellation consisting of sharing managers, while ordinary employees are external to the constellation
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