Study On The Formulation Of Shared Leadership And Its Influence Mechanism On Knowledge-based Team Performance

With the increasing integration of knowledge among several disciplines in an era of knowledge, educated employees, as the subject of knowledge-based activities, are becoming more dependent on "team". Knowledge team makes an important contribution on stimulating the potential of educated staff, promoting integration of multidisciplinary knowledge, and harnessing synergistic effect of knowledge. However, it also brings challenge towards the traditional vertical Leadership Model of "a person’in charge’, the other follows". The reason is that with the increasing requirements on creativity and complexity of knowledge work, it will be reduced for individual leader at a team to gain the possibility of success on effectively implementing all essential leading functions. Recent research shows that leadership can be shared between the team leader and team members. When team member owns some crucial knowledge, skills or ability on certain prospect, he can exercise leadership in the corresponding area. This is a process-based new model called shared leadership (short for SL).In recent years, shared leadership theory has become a new hot spot in leadership research at both theoretical and practical aspects. From the perspective of theoretical research, from the20th century70’s, scholars had made some breakthrough researches on concepts meaning of shared leadership theory, the implementation conditions of shared leadership, and the relationship between sharing leadership and organizational performance etc. From the perspective of practical research, the shared leadership model is widely used in medical diagnosis, school education, new product development and other knowledge-intensive areas. According to the review of existing researches on shared leadership, the author found that current research and practice in China towards shared leadership is still in its infancy. And it is inadequate for researches in China on the evolution process of shared leadership and the function system of shared leadership on team performance, which play an important role on promoting the development of theory and practice on shared leadership. Therefore, this dissertation tries to take a discussion towards these problems through the following three aspects:(1) What is the evolution process of shared leadership in knowledge team? How many stages are there in this process? And what kind of characters are there in each stage?(2) Does shared leadership has a positive impact on team performance? And are there some differences compared to the results of Western studies?(3) Which are the antecedent variables to affect the formulation of shared leadership in knowledge team? What is the function system of shared leadership behavior on team performance?This dissertation consists of six chapters to discuss the problems. The main content and conclusions of each chapter are summarized as follows:Chapter Ⅰ, Background and literature review. First, this chapter introduces the theoretical and practical background of study and puts forward the research questions. Second, it summarizes the relevant literatures on shared leadership, knowledge team and influences of shared leadership behavior on team performance, etc; third, it interprets the contribution of this study and some problems for further study.Chapter Ⅱ, General design of this dissertation. First, based on literature review, it demonstrates the purpose of study in this dissertation. Second, it defines ten relevant core concepts of this study, including shared leadership. Finally, it illustrates the overall framework of this dissertation, the design of this research and technical thinking way.Chapter Ⅲ, Study on the formation and development of shared leadership model in knowledge team. Based on the literature review and systematical methodology, this chapter is conducted with empirical interviews and typical case studies focusing on the formation and development of shared leadership model in knowledge team. The research discovers that it is a continuous and progressive process for shared leadership model in knowledge team to form and develop. This process can be divided into three stages:preparation stage, adaptation stage and standardization stage. During preparation stage, the main purpose is to achieve the leader role’s transition from the external team leader to internal core team leader. During adaptation stage, the main objective is to fulfill the sharing of decision-making rights. During standardization stage, the team leader turns to be supporters, promoters and coach. And each team member makes full use of their abilities respectively in their professional areas, shoulders more responsibilities and conducts others to complete the team work.Chapters IV, study on the effect of the shared leadership behavior on knowledge team performance. According to the researches of Pearce and Sims (2002), Ensley and Hmieleski, etc.(2006)and interviews, this chapter divided Chinese shared leadership in knowledge-based team into five dimension: mandatory shared leadership, instructional shared leadership, transactional shared leadership, innovational shared leadership, and authorized shared leadership. Based on this kind of classification, this chapter takes a deep discussion about the effect of different kinds of shared leadership affecting team performance by using correlation analysis, regression analysis and other statistical techniques, The findings are as follows:first, shared leadership has a significant positive influence on task performance and contextual perfonnance of knowledge team.(β=0.452and0.473, P<0.05). Second, in addition to mandatory shared leadership, other four dimensions of shared leadership have a significant positive influence on task performance in knowledge-based team. Third, from the perspective of the extent of influence, the impact forces on task performance are as follows:innovational shared leadership (β=0.547), authorized shared leadership (β=0.541), instructional shared leadership (β=0.372), transactional shared leadership (β=0.150), mandatory shared leadership (β=-0.269). Meanwhile, the impact forces on contextual performance are as follows:authorized shared leadership (β=0.826), innovational shared leadership (β=0.708), instructional shared leadership (β=0.624), transactional shared leadership (β=0.367), mandatory shared leadership (β=-0.491).This dissertation has studied the internal mechanism between the shared leadership and its effect on the knowledge team performance. This research introduced the variables like shared knowledge, Job role ambiguity, work pressure and job satisfaction to explore the internal mechanism between the shared leadership’s effect on knowledge performance, furthermore, through Structural Equation Modeling, this dissertation explored the effect and mechanism of the above four variables. Chapter Ⅴ, studies on antecedent variables and integration mechanism of shared leadership. Based on the literature review, this chapter builds a model of antecedent variables and integration mechanism of shared leadership. And then its validity is verified by using structural equation model (SEM). The results show: first, interpersonal trust among members (β=0.462), expressing right of members (β=0.41) supports from the external leaders (β=0.539) are the key factors to affect the formation and development of shared leadership. Second, shared leadership plays a negative role on work pressure (β=-0.492) and role ambiguity (β=-0.627) of educated employees. And it has a positive effect on knowledge-sharing behavior (β=-0.762) Third, the impact of the leadership model in knowledge team towards, team performance is not a simple linear relationship, Knowledge sharing and role ambiguity play as a mediator between shared leadership behavior and team performance.Chapter Ⅵ, Summary and Prediction. This chapter summarized four aspects as follows:the main conclusions from this study, innovations on research theory, inspiration towards practical aspect, limitations and prospects of the research.Theoretical contributions of this dissertation are:First, this dissertation makes an exploration on mechanism of forming and developing shared leadership. On this aspect, Bligh and Pearce (2006) have proposed on a way of thinking about forming and developing shared leadership, which is using self-leadership to promote team trust, team effectiveness and team commitment so as to affect shared team leadership and ultimately to promote knowledge innovation in the team. On the basis of the literature review and amounts of empirical research on interviews and typical cases studies, from the perspective of leader’s network changing, this dissertation proposes three phases of forming shared leadership:preparation stage, adaptation stage and standardization stage. And it elaborates the task of team task at each stage and the objective of promoting changes on network of leader, which will be a positive force to promote sublimation and development of theory on this aspect. Second, this dissertation makes some innovation in the areas of influence mechanism of shared leadership behavior on team performance of the mechanism. On one hand, the study found that there are difference on the relationship of shared leadership behavior and team performance relationship between in western countries and in China. On the other hand, it is initial to discuss the mechanism that knowledge sharing and role ambiguity play as a mediator between shared leadership behavior and team performance.The contributions on the practical aspect are:it provides new thinking ways and perspectives for shared leadership practice in knowledge team. First, this dissertation makes a systematical discussion about the process of formulation and development of shared leadership system and changing process of leader’s network in every stage, which provide the appropriate standard and reference for shared leader practice. Second, the empirical analysis on antecedent variables and intermediary role of shared leadership towards team performance will evoke team shared leader paying more attention on the influencing function of external leader, organizational training, motivation mechanism and organization in the process of formulation and development of shared leadership.As Merkens and Spence (1998) said,"shared leadership has become the key to the survival of organization if without shared leadership, the organization may die." Although shared leadership research and practice in China is still in its infant, as the evolution of shared leadership in knowledge team in China, shared leadership in China will have more important influence on the practice and application in knowledge-based team and will make outstanding contributions on improving team performance to higher levels.