Shared Leadership Emergence in Product Development Project Teams—A Reflective Practice Perspective

Abstract

Many researchers believe that leadership is “the most critical ingredient of team success”. The paper presents a shared leadership emergence in product development project teams. We conducted two steps research, by applying reflective practice perspective approach in the semi structured interviews and workshops within the German company which represents a dynamic and changing environment, and practice shared leadership in product development project teams. Results show alignment with previous theory about the topic, but also added new viewpoints trough glasses of practitioners. They believe that complex environment is the main driver for shared leadership, where emergence as an informal process and factors in practice are hard to be influenced. The findings show that interactions between people and team dynamics play a central role in shared leadership emergence and the resulting increase in the complexity of the leadership construct. This paper contributes to shared leadership research by adding a reflective practice dimension and bridging the theory with practice.