New Forms of Management

Abstract

The Journal of Personnel Psychology (JPP) announces a special issue focusing on shared and distributed leadership in organizations. The focus will be on possible antecedents, moderators, and processes and outcomes of shared leadership in organizations. In today’s organizations, hierarchies are often replaced by team-based work structures. Organizations are faced with uncertainty and fast-changing environments, and work tasks are becoming increasingly complex. To succeed, organizations therefore need new forms of leadership to integrate the challenging and complex demands. Shared leadership describes a leadership in today’s organizations that is distributed on different levels and can be defined as “a dynamic interactive influence among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both” (Pearce & Conger, 2003, p. 1). While our knowledge on these concepts, particularly from the theoretical point of view but also from the practitioner side, has grown, systematic investigations of the potential antecedents, processes, and contingencies of shared leadership in organizations are still relatively scarce. More research isneeded here (see Pearce, 2008; Pearce & Conger, 2003), and the current special issue is aimed toward filling this gap. This special issue will consider papers that explore the antecedents, processes, moderating variables, and outcomes of shared leadership and distributed leadership across different levels of the organization. Topics that are consistent with this purpose include: – What are the key antecedents of shared leaders? What causes shared leadership to occur? Why do leadership transitions occur? – What are the important mediating processes of shared and distributed leadership in organizations? – How does shared leadership impact on employee health, well-being, and satisfaction? – How can supervisors strengthen and encourage the collective leadership of their team members? – What role does empowerment and employee influence play? How important is organizational participation in its different forms, intensities, and levels? – How do we measure shared and distributed leadership? – How important is employee self-leadership? What role do self-management skills or proactivity of the members play? – Does shared leadership reduce employee turnover? – How does team composition (e.g., diversity in terms of members’ personality or other aspects) relate to or interact with shared leadership? – How important and how effective is shared leadership in modern and globalized or “virtual” workplaces? – Does shared leadership have only positive consequences, or are there also possible caveats? What might be important hindrances of shared leadership effectiveness?