On Shared Leadership

Since the1990s, in-depth development of economic globalization and rapidadvances in information technology, the wheel of history promoted people into thegovernance era. In today’s world, things across the border often occur, whichinclude the organizational boundaries, professional boundaries, culturalboundaries and even the boundaries of the ground. With humans facing globalwarming, overpopulation, terrorist organizations and other complex problems,these problems cannot rely solely on the single force. The rapidly changingorganizational environment, flat and networked forms of organization, andMulti-agent governance test the public leaders and the capability of publicorganizational governance. The public leaders must span multiple boundaries andmultiple subjects to better organize social relations, maximize the interests of thecommunity and manage the common problems. However, the existing leadershipand the official standard thinking are still strong; The civic participation is notstrong; the positions of their roles is not clear. This contradiction makes the publicleaders not to adapt the changes, which were brought by the governance era ofcooperation, equality, networking and the coexistence of multi-center. Changes ofthe public organization environment of and Social environment require the leadersto change their Innovative concepts and values, and then guide them toward a newmodel of leadership.Based on the previous studies, shared leadership integrated the governancerequirements of the times are proposed as a new type of leadership. The newleadership keeps the public spirit as the precondition, sees cooperative thinking asthe core, uses values as the management tools, keeps shared learning as theinherent requirements and sees critical spirit as the power. The new leadershipemphasizes that leaders should handle inter-organizational relations correctly, andpromotes cooperation, and creates and maintains the value of this authoritativebasis, pursuit the common performance with the interests of the multiple governance bodies. The concept of shared leadership and the requirements ofgovernance era are consistent. Both recognized the pluralistic governance bodies,and think the governance bodies are equal and pursuit of cooperation, and believethat the network-based governance structure is more conducive to publicproblem-solving and the implementation of the public interest.The shared leadership is not the solution to the problem. The last part of thepaper presents paths towards shared leadership. There are many constraints andpractical obstacles to the implementation of shared leadership. If you want toachieve this model, you must overcome these obstacles. In order to study theindividual thinking of the leadership and changes in concept, and provideexecutable methods for the leaders, this paper assumes that the organizationalconditions and civil society is relatively well. The leaders should develop abilitiesin different aspects, such as win-win cooperation, systems integration thinking,and changes of the values, public spirit, and the negotiating capacity.The shared leadership presented in his paper is only an attempt to responsethe governance environment. Whether the shared leadership effectively promotesthe realization of the public interest and solves public problem, are yet to be testedin practice.