The Role Configurations Of Shared Leadership And Their Effects On Team Creativity

Cross-functional teams have become the fundamental units of organizations that strive to implement strategies to enhance innovation because of the turbulent environment and the rise of competition in business.Excepting using technical approach,cross-functional teams are trying to use leadership approach to increase their creativity.Since the individualized heroic view of leadership is outdated,researchers and practitioners have increasingly turned to shared leadership.An umbrella of research has found teams with shared leadership can better respond to the demands of today's knowledge-intensive and complex work environment.However,past research did not specify leader role configurations when multiple members share leadership.Moreover,previous research provided little knowledge about shared leadership in China.Thus,This dissertation aims to conceptualize the role configurations of sharing leadership and examines how different role configurations of sharing leadership affect team creativity.This dissertation also takes the first step to understand how shared leadership is enacted in Chinese companiesCross-functional teams are chosen as following reasons.First,the formal leader does not necessarily have all the knowledge required for tasks so that they cannot fulfill all the required leadership functions.This opens the door for sharing leadership.Second,cross-functional teams are the most common form of team structures to pursue innovation.An extraordinary level of team creativity promised by cross-functional structure could aid team to achieve its goals.To theorize and examine the role configurations of shared leadership,I first clarified the theoretical connotation of shared leadership by answering two fundamental questions "what is shared" and "how to share".By integrating the role perspective and relational perspective,I proposed that shared leadership is a very complex,multi-level,dynamic process that emerges at the crossroads of a distribution of the four kinds of leadership roles:(a)planning and organizing,(b)problem solving,(c)support and consideration,(d)development and mentoring.Because the social constructed nature of these leadership roles,I measured both the actors and observers' perceptions of who exhibits these roles and used the social network analysis to capture the role configurations.Four different leadership role networks were mapped and these networks were multi-directional and asymmetric.Moreover,I employed social network analysis to evaluate the complex and 3D shared leadership network using two dimension:the leadership sharedness(the extent to which the specific leadership role is shared by group members)and the leadership role-enactment dispersion(the extent which different leadership roles are permanently assigned to group members).Overall,I designed three empirical studies to explore:(a)the formal leadership position in role configurations of shared leadership;(b)the relationship between role configurations and team creativity;(c)the mechanism underlying the effects of role configurations of shared leadership on team creativity.Study 1 explored the formal leader position in the role configurations of shared leadership.I tested the proposed model in study 1 by using social network analysis from 235 members and 52 formal leaders in 52 cross-functional teams.Results showed that formal leaders and informal leaders shared the lead on different leadership roles,formal leaders were dominant in planning&organizing and developing&mentoring,while informal leaders were dominant in both problem solving and supporting&consideration.In study 2,I tested the effects of the shared leadership role configurations on team creativity.I collected data from 70 cross-functional teams in high-tech industry in China and the results showed that the only a subsets of leadership roles to be shared would bring positive impacts on team creativity.Specially,sharing planning&organizing roles was negative to team creativity,while sharing development&mentoring had no significant impact on team creativity.Furthermore,I found task complexity was an important contingent factor that fortified the effects of the sharedness of leadership and the leadership role-enactment dispersion(both positive and negative).Finally,I explored the effects of shared leadership role configurations on team creativity through task and relationship conflict.I tested my hypotheses using a sample of 74 cross-functional teams in China.Results demonstrated that the sharedness of leadership was positively related to team creativity and this effect was partly mediated by both task conflict and relationship conflict.In addition,shared leadership role-enactment dispersion played a moderating role in the relationship between the sharedness of leadership and task conflict,as well as in the relationship between sharedness of leadership and relationship conflict.This dissertation makes several theoretical contributions to shared leadership and creativity literatures.First,I conceptualize the role configurations of shared leadership by integrating the relational perspective and the role perspective.I expand the shared leadership theory and reveal the functional aspect and structural aspect of shared leadership simultaneously.Second,I explore the position of formal leaders in the shared leadership role configurations,and uncover the complementary relationship between formal leader and informal leaders.Third,I connect the relationship between the role configurations of shared leadership and team creativity and point out the direction for optimizing team creativity.Fourth,I propose a dual path model that task conflict and relationship conflict together explains the effects of role configurations on team creativity.I demonstrate that shared leadership could engender constructive conflicts,and thus facilitate team creativity.