Team member political skill and empowering leadership: Sharing the lead means also to follow

Abstract

While the importance of shared leadership for team performance is well established, theory and evidence on what motivates team members’ to share the lead is scarce. Therefore, in our research we investigated the role of political skill, an indicator of individual social effectiveness, for team members’ probability of taking the lead and granting leadership responsibility to each other. Drawing on social exchange theory we hypothesized that political skill enables individuals to establish and maintain high quality relationships, which supports both the taking of leadership for oneself and the granting of leadership to other team members. Further, we hypothesized that empowering leadership by the formal leader, which already has been found to support shared leadership, can support this function by providing team members with power and autonomy to engage in leadership activities. We tested our hypotheses using social network analysis in a R&D -department of 37 team members resulting in a network with 812 dyads. Our findings support our hypotheses, establishing political skill as important antecedent for shared leadership and further increasing our understanding of how formal leaders, through empowering leadership behaviors, can help establish shared leadership in their teams. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.