Shared Leadership, Unshared Burdens: How Shared Leadership Structure Schema Lowers Individual Enjoyment Without Increasing Performance

Abstract

Despite the growing popularity of shared leadership, there is little research on how beliefs about the benefits of shared leadership—a shared leadership structure schema (LSS)—affect individual outcomes. We address this by integrating adaptive leadership and conservation of resources theories. We apply adaptive leadership theory to hypothesize that a shared LSS leads individuals to support shared leadership by interacting more frequently and taking on interpersonal responsibility, especially when low peer engagement signals a leadership void that shared LSS members try to fill. However, adaptive leadership theory does not discuss how the tendencies motivated by shared LSS impacts members’ outcome. Therefore, we apply conservation of resources theory to hypothesize that taking on interpersonal responsibility makes frequent interactions more stressful, thereby harming individual enjoyment. Further, the demands of interpersonal responsibility reduce members’ ability to process the information acquired in interactions, which negates interaction frequency’s usual performance benefits. Together, these theories suggest that, especially when peer engagement is low, shared LSS has a negative indirect effect on enjoyment and an attenuating effect on performance through interaction frequency due to shared LSS members taking on interpersonal responsibility. We test our model using five waves of multisource data on student consulting teams. Our results extend understanding of shared LSS’s consequences to the individual level and highlight potential costs of supporting shared leadership.