The Effects And Mechanisms Of Shared Leadership On Team And Individual Outputs

In knowledge economy era, organizations encounter more complex and dynamic environments. For one thing, team-basd management has been the core of organization development as the flattered of organization structure, for another thing, employees expected more about their work roles and to experience more diversified work roles as the labor nature and desire have changed. Faced with thess pressures, the traditional top-down, single formal leadership has been unable to deal with the massive information, process and transferes them timely, moreover, they also can not make decisions quickly and accurately regarding of all kinds of issues in organizations. Under this situation, shared leadership, a collective leadership origining from team members' active participation and autonomous management, and their mutual influence, has played an essential role in enhancing team outputs and individual outputs. In this dissertation, it mainly focuses on the effects of shared leadership on team and indiivudal outputs, and its mechanisms and boundary conditions with empirial analyses on basis of samples of Chinese enterprise employees, which not only expands and enriches the extant literature of shared leadership, makes up for the defects of previous research, but also provides some valuble practical implications to team management and team and individual effectiveness enhancement.In the first part of dissertation, it summarized the literature review of shared leadership, which was consisted of four major parts. Part one presented the definition, measurement of shared leadership, as well as the relevant theoretical perspectives regarding how shared leadership forms. Part two reviewed the antecedents of shared leadership. Part three reviewed the effects of shared leadership. Part four reviewed the mediating and moderating mechanisms of shared leadership. On basis of this literature review, several theoretical gaps of the extant shared leadership research were discussed and the purposes of this dissertation were also clarified.Previous studies have almost focused on the effect of shared leadership on team performance which belongs to a distal team output, lacking the examination about the relationship between shared leadership and team proximal behaviors. This limitation not only hinders why shared leadership can improve team outputs, but also restricts the comprehensive understanding of a series of positive team outputs assocatied with shared leadership. The first study examines the relationship between shared leadership and team creativity, and the mediating roles of team information exchange and team passionnate climate, and the moderating role of environmental uncertainty. Analyses of multisource data from 79 work teams and 286 team members revealed that:the relationship between shared leadership and team creativity was not significant through the mediating role of cognitive team information exchange; the relationship between shared leadership and team creativity was significant through the mediating role of affective team passionate climate; environmental uncertainty positively moderated the effect of shared leadership on team passionate climate, the higher environmental uncertainty was, the more positive effect of shared leadership on team passionate climate; environmental uncertainty positively moderated the indiect effect of shared leadership on team creativity via team passionate climate, the higher environmental uncertainty was, the stronger of the indirect effect.As shared leadership derives from individual team members' social interactions, it may also affect individual creativity when it influences team creativity. While it is a pity that scarce research examines the relationship between shared leadership and individual outputs and team outputs simultaneously. On this basis, the second study examines the multilevel effect of shared leadership on individual team member creativity and its mechanisms, and the relationship between individual team member creativity and team creativity, and how to transfer individual team member creativity into team creativity effectively. Analyses of multisource date from 64 work teams and 251 team members revealed that:individual team member role breadth self-effiacy mediated the relationship between shared leadership and individual creativity; the average of individual creativity mediated the relationship between shared leadership and team creativity; individual-focused transformational leadership positively moderated the effect of shared leadership on individual role breadth self-efficacy, the higher the individual-focused transformational leadership was, the more positive effect of shared leadership on individual role breadth self-efficacy; individual-focused transformational leadership positively moderated the effect of shared leadership on the average individual creativity, the higher the individual-focused transformational leadership was, the more positive effect of shared leadership on the average individual creativity; group-focused transformational leadership positively moderated the effect of average individual creativity on team creativity, the higher the group-focused transformational leadership was, the more positive effect of the average individual creativity on team creativity.Despite most researchers examined the relationship between shared leadership and team performance, there was no consistent conclusion about the effect of shared leadership on team performance. Current researches found that shared leadership not only positively influenced team performance, but also negatively influenced team performance, while the reasons why shared leadership had such a double-edged sword effect on team performance still remained unanswered. The third study examines the boundary conditions between shared leadership and team performance. Analyses of multisource data from 64 work teams and 252 team members reavealed that:leadership configuration, team monitoring and team member cooperative orientation positively moderated the effect of shared leadership on team performance, when the leadership distributed equally among team members, teams had high level of team monitoring and cooperative orientation, shared leadership had a more positive influence on team performance. Vice versa, the positive effect of shared leadership on team performance was nonsignificant, and the effect even was negative.In the final part of the dissertation, the main findings of the dissertation were concluded, and the limitations and future directions were discussed as well.