Toward a practice of shared leadership: An action research study

The purpose of this study was to identify the conditions under which shared leadership emerged in an integrated research and development (R&D) team embedded in a 130-year-old Fortune 50 oil and gas company. Participants in the study included 19 people who worked in the R&D area and held front-line, middle management, and senior leadership jobs. The R&D organization spanned two different business units, which had experienced difficulties in collaborating on issues that undermined business success. The study focused on how participants shifted from a silo culture to shared leadership and more effective collaboration. The author of the present study worked with the teams as a consultant to help them successfully adopt Shared Leadership practices and used the opportunity to study the transformation process.;Previous research in shared leadership has demonstrated benefits for organizational performance; this study adds to that literature by describing the conditions that enabled shared leadership and how the methodology enabled the transition. This study used an action research (AR) methodology to identify conditions that either encouraged or discouraged shared leadership and actions that enabled supporting shifts in interaction patterns and mental models.;The research design incorporated several data sources including individual interviews, observations of interactions, personal and group reflections, and relevant artifacts. Through semistructured interviews, information was collected from participants at multiple points in the process. The data were coded and organized by themes across two cycles of AR and conditions that supported or hindered the shift to shared leadership were identified.;This research supported findings from other empirical research, in that shared leadership improved capacity for managing complexity and enabled collaborative problem solving. Although the process was challenging, this study demonstrated that it is possible for a multidisciplinary, hierarchical group to break down silos and begin to work interdependently. These findings advance the field of study by describing practices critical to shared leadership and common pitfalls to be avoided during the change process.