To Share or Not to Share: Centering Individual Perspectives in Shared Leadership

Abstract

Extant research in shared leadership has generally demonstrated a positive impact on team processes and effectiveness. However, the literature to date has largely failed to examine the individual level processes inherent in shared leadership, thereby neglecting the perspectives of individual team members. Moreover, extant research has also largely overlooked the potential dark sides of shared leadership. To address these limitations, we integrate job demands-resources theory and appraisal-based theories of stress to develop a conceptual framework that centers the individual team members in the shared leadership process. We suggest that shared leadership creates conditions that present a range of job demands for individual team members, and that their individual differences impact how team members appraise those job demands. Further, we suggest that appraisals of shared leadership demands by individual team members may influence their engagement in relational job crafting, as well as impact their individual effectiveness, which when accumulated over time, could impact the dynamic evolution of team-level shared leadership structures as well as team effectiveness. Lastly, we highlight how team members who repeatedly experience shared leadership demands as a hindrance could be at a potential risk of burnout. Through our conceptual framework, we lay the groundwork to enable future researchers to center individual team members in their theoretical and empirical explorations into shared leadership. In addition to our framework, we outline future research directions to expand our conceptual model and provide methodological guidance to empirically examine the theoretical perspectives that we have developed in this paper.