How Should Leadership Be Structured? Lay Theories of Single and Shared Leadership Structures

Abstract

Research suggests that sharing leadership among multiple team members promotes effective team functioning. The extent to which team members are willing to share leadership is driven in part by their lay theories of team leadership. However, there is little research into whether these lay theories are consistent across different situations. We hypothesize that people believe that teams that consolidate leadership in a single individual will outperform teams that share leadership. We document and explore the boundary conditions of this effect over five experiments in which participants made forecasts about the performance of teams with different leadership structures or chose leadership structures for teams under a variety of task conditions. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate people’s general belief that teams with single, stable leaders are more effective. However, Studies 3, 4 and 5 show that these implicit preferences can be reversed for certain kinds of tasks. This preference reversal is more complex than simply sharing leadership – certain task characteristics lead people to endorse multiple, simultaneous leaders (multiple leadership), while others lead people to endorse handing off the leadership function over time (dynamic leadership). These findings suggest that people’s lay theories of team leadership may not be as consistent as previously thought, and that people’s lay theories of team leadership include multiple facets of “sharing” leadership, including independent lay theories of multiple and dynamic leadership.