Vertical and Shared Leadership Processes: Exploring Team Leadership Dynamics

Abstract

Although scholars have increasingly recognized that leadership can arise from a number of sources in team settings, relatively little research has explored different leadership sources and the implications of such leadership for team effectiveness. We address this gap by examining vertical and shared leadership in an independent field study. We validated a measure of vertical and shared transformational and transactional leadership, participative goal setting, individual and team empowerment, and aversive leadership and consequently, we tested the relationships between shared and vertical leadership behaviors and team effectiveness. We find that both vertical and shared leadership are associated with team effectiveness and that the vertical leadership and team effectiveness relationship is mediated, in part, through shared leadership. We discuss the implications of these results for team leadership theory and practice.