Abstract
Leadership plays an essential part in creating competitive advantage and well-being among employees. One way in which formal leaders can deal with the variety of responsibilities that comes with their role is to share their responsibilities with team members (i.e., shared leadership). Although there is abundant literature on how high-quality peer leadership benefits team effectiveness (TE) and well-being, there is only limited evidence about the underpinning mechanisms of these relationships and how the formal leader can support this process. To address this lacuna, we conducted an online survey study with 146 employees from various organizations. The results suggest that an empowering leadership style of the formal leader is associated with higher perceived peer leadership quality (PLQ) on four different leadership roles (i.e., task, motivational, social, and external leader). In addition, formal leaders who empower their team members are also perceived as better leaders themselves. Moreover, the improved PLQ was in turn positively related to TE and work satisfaction, while being negatively related to burnout. In line with the social identity approach, we found that team identification mediated these relationships. Thus, high-quality peer leaders succeeded in creating a shared sense of “us” in the team, and this team identification in turn generated all the positive outcomes. To conclude, by sharing their lead and empowering the peer leaders in their team, formal leaders are key drivers of the team’s effectiveness, while also enhancing team members’ health and well-being.
Highlights
For many decades, organizational structures were vertically structured with the formal leader being hierarchically placed above the followers
The results revealed that only 17.0% of the participants indicated that the four leadership roles were occupied by one single leader; 18.9% stated that these roles were taken on by two different team members; 40.9% reported that the roles were fulfilled by three different team members and 23.5% of the participants said that the four leadership roles were occupied by four different team members
Our findings revealed that formal leaders stimulated peer leadership quality (PLQ) by engaging in Empowering leadership (EL), which in turn seems to be an asset for reaching critical work outcomes
Summary
Organizational structures were vertically structured with the formal leader being hierarchically placed above the followers This conceptualization inferred that leadership is a downward process in which a single individual in a team or organization – the formal leader – influences his or her followers (Pearce and Conger, 2003; Bass and Bass, 2008). Since the beginning of the new millennium, organizations are faced with fast-changing environments and increasing workload with complex tasks (Day et al, 2004). These changes place unrealistic expectations upon formal leaders, as it is unlikely that a single person can effectively perform all leadership responsibilities (Yukl, 2010). Organizations have increasingly started to question this conventional single-leader paradigm.
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