Leadership is generally thought to flow from the top to the bottom in organizations. In fact, a cursory glanceat thepopularpress showsvery clearly that top organizational leaders—the Chief Executive Officer orManagingDirector—are often glorified as being the brains behind the success of the entire organization (e.g., Ray Kroc ofMcDonald’s, Bill Gates ofMicrosoft) or vilified as the cause of an organization’s downfall (e.g., Kenneth Lay of Enron). A look behind the scenes, however, shows a far more complex situation. At McDonald’s, for instance, it was the Chief Financial Officer, Harry J. Sonnenborn, who spearheaded the financial, franchising, and real estate model that drovemuch of the company’s success.AtMicrosoft, SteveBallmer is another example of a key leader who played an important role in success of the business. On the flip side, the crestfallen Enronwas not driven into the ground by Lay alone. Andrew Fastow, as well as others (e.g., Jeffrey Skilling), led them into the abyss of disgrace and bankruptcy. The reality atMcDonald’s,Microsoft, and Enron was that there weremany other people sharing the lead in either the success or the failure attributed to the CEO. Recently, there has been a growing recognition that leadership isnot a soloact.Aswedrive further into the age of knowledgework, for example, therehasbeen an increasing use of team-based organizational structures. Indeed, this shift in the way work is organized has caused many people to rethink the old, top-down perspective on leadership. More specifically, perspectives about leadership have evolved away from “leadership as a role” to something closer to “leadership as a shared social process.” This new paradigm on leadership has typically been labeled shared leadership, although a fewother related termshave also been used (e.g., collaborative, collective, connective, distributed, networked, rotated, and so forth). Nevertheless, all of these terms readily fit under the umbrella term of shared leadership. While scholars have presented considerable theoretical discussions of shared leadership (see Pearce & Conger, 2003 for a thorough foundation), there has been far less empirical study of the phenomenon. Nonetheless, the early evidence seems to suggest that shared leadership is apotent predictor of group outcomes. That said, each empirical study, taken on its own, only offers a discrete contribution to understanding the possible positive influence of shared leadership on group outcomes. Fortunately, a recent study by Danni Wang, David Waldman, and Zhen Zhang, all of Arizona State University, picks up the mantle of the empirical examination of shared leadership.What is impressive about this study is that Wang and her colleagues have tied together the existing empirical studies of shared leadership in acomprehensive,holisticassessmentof the literature. In particular, Wang and her colleagues addressed a series of important and fundamental questions about shared leadership. Does shared leadership predict group outcomes? What kinds of shared leadership behavior are more or less potent? Is shared leadership more predictive of different types of group outcomes? Are certain types of contexts more or less suited for shared leadership? How does the way inwhich shared leadership is assessed impact its predictive utility? And, finally, is shared leadership a better predictor of groupoutcomesthantop-down,hierarchical leadership?
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Jun 9, 2017
Myrna Cristina Morales-Avila 
Open Access
