Vertical versus shared leadership as predictors of the effectiveness of change management teams: An examination of aversive, directive, transactional, transformational, and empowering leader behaviors.

Abstract

This study investigated vertical versus shared leadership as predictors of the effectiveness of 71 change management teams. Vertical leadership stems from an appointed or formal leader of a team, whereas shared leadership (C. L. Pearce, 1997; C. L. Pearce & J. A. Conger, in press; C. L. Pearce & H. P. Sims, 2000) is a group process in which leadership is distributed among, and stems from, team members. Team effectiveness was measured approximately 6 months after the assessment of leadership and was also measured from the viewpoints of managers, internal customers, and team members. Using multiple regression, the authors found both vertical and shared leadership to be significantly related to team effectiveness ( p .05), although shared leadership appears to be a more useful predictor of team effectiveness than vertical leadership. The increasing use of empowered teams and concomitant flattening of organizational structures (Mohrman, Cohen, & Mohrman, 1995) brings into question the more traditional models of leadership. What kind of leadership is more appropriate for this new team-based environment? Pearce (1997), Yukl (1998), Pearce and Sims (2000), and Pearce and Conger (in press) have suggested that shared leadership—leadership that emanates from the members of teams, and not simply from the appointed team leader— may provide the answer to this question. Thus, we investigated this issue within the context of change management teams (CMTs). The CMTs in this study are teams that, while not fully self-managing, have a very high degree of decision-making latitude for improving the operations in their respective areas of responsibility. Thus, our results are most applicable to highautonomy teams that engage in complex tasks, and they may not generalize to traditional work groups. The teams in this study are also all drawn from one organization, which helps to control for situational variables that might influence team effectiveness (e.g., organizational culture) but may limit the generalizability to alternate organizational contexts. More specifically, we explored how the behavior of the appointed team leaders (vertical leadership) versus distributed influence from within the team (shared leadership) accounted for the effectiveness of the CMTs. In this article, we briefly review the behavioral model of leadership that forms the basis of this study and then review literature related to the shared leadership process. We offer several hypotheses regarding the potential role of team leadership in team effectiveness. Subsequently, we describe our methods, present our results, and offer a discussion and conclusion.