A Commentary on Choudhury and Maupin (2025): Revisiting the Downsides of Shared Leadership From a Multilevel and Resource-Oriented Perspective

Choudhury and Maupin (2025) present a framework that highlights the downsides of shared leadership for individual team members (e.g., higher demands, increased burnout). While their framework has the potential to add value to the positively skewed conversation on shared leadership, their theorizing appears selective and overlooks established theoretical and empirical work in the field. This commentary identifies three conceptual issues that warrant reconsideration: (1) the neglect of the multilevel nature of shared leadership, (2) the overlooked role of shared leadership as a team resource, and (3) the omission of formal leadership. To address these limitations, the commentary offers corresponding recommendations to strengthen and extend the framework.

Issue 1: Multilevel Issues in the Conceptualization of Shared Leadership

Choudhury and Maupin (2025) argue that “the lack of attention to individual team members in the shared leadership process has resulted in a ‘black box’ regarding the multilevel mechanisms of shared leadership”. We believe, however, that by focusing exclusively on individual-level experiences, the authors miss the very multilevel mechanisms their framework seeks to address.

There is consensus in the literature to define shared leadership “as an emergent team phenomenon whereby leadership roles and influence are distributed among team members” (Zhu et al., 2018, p. 837). This highlights that shared leadership cannot be attributed to a single individual (i.e., it is not a role that one individual can take on), but rather it is a dynamic process within the team that unfolds through the mutual interactions among team members.

Shared leadership, therefore, emerges from individual actions embedded within a social context (i.e., the team as a whole and the available dyads within the team) rather than happening in a vacuum. As such, shared leadership should be understood, and has been understood by previous research, as a dynamic process that unfolds within a team context and over time. It is shaped by individuals who actively claim and grant leadership and followership roles, and negotiate their respective roles and identities through ongoing interactions (DeRue & Ashford, 2010; Drescher et al., 2014; Pearce & Conger, 2003).

Without understanding this process, a key element in the framework by Choudhury and Maupin (2025) remains unclear, namely how shared leadership as an emergent team-level process exerts cross-level effects on the individual-level demands of single team members. Specifically, shared leadership is shaped not only by an individual’s contributions (or an informal role that a team member claims) but also by how those contributions come together within the team. Choudhury and Maupin’s (2025) emphasis on the individual (level) neglects this critical aspect. It could lead to the interpretation that the consequences of shared leadership are mainly determined by how individuals perceive their informal leadership role as a demand or resource. This view, however, neglects the possibility that team-level leadership dynamics influence individual perceptions of demands (for further elaboration, see Issue 2).

We propose two ways to reconcile this issue within Choudhury and Maupin’s framework to explain the cross-level effects of shared leadership on individual team members. First, it needs a more nuanced understanding of what individual-level shared leadership entails. Drawing on adaptive leadership theory (DeRue & Ashford, 2010), an individual perspective on the team members’ perception and engagement in the reciprocal process of claiming and granting leadership influence may be a first step. For instance, the authors could consider situations where an individual’s leadership claims are met with complementary responses from other team members (i.e., a leadership claim is reciprocated by the team granting leadership) and consider the implications of this dynamic for the individual’s perceived rewards and risks. This approach could shed light on how the individual’s level of demands relates to their contribution to the shared leadership process.

Second, shared leadership may result in collective demands for the team, which may, in turn, exert a cross-level effect on the demands experienced by individual team members. This perspective is supported by the JD-R theory (Bakker et al., 2023), which posits that job demands and resources are not merely subjective perceptions but also objective job characteristics and that team members often share similar perceptions of these demands and resources. Additionally, higher-level demands trickle down and influence demands at lower levels (Bakker et al., 2023). As such, collective demands at the team level may play a significant role in shaping the individual demands experienced by team members.

Issue 2: Shared Leadership as a Team Resource

Choudhury and Maupin (2025) propose that individual team members experience shared leadership as demand due to their various informal leadership behaviors associated with their claimed informal leadership role. These behaviors, rooted in the functional leadership approach (Morgeson et al., 2010), may include task planning and goal clarification, fostering a cohesive team climate, providing feedback, and representing the team to external stakeholders. Furthermore, shared leadership is considered an informal source of team leadership that intends to satisfy team needs and facilitate team functioning (Morgeson et al., 2010). Taking this functional leadership approach as a theoretical backdrop, conceptualizing shared leadership as a demand for the individual team members seems contradictory. These leadership behaviors, in fact, (a) create job resources for the team and its members, as they aim at satisfying team needs and enabling team functioning (Klasmeier & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2024), and (b) provide a wide range of job resources such as experiencing autonomy, mastery, and growth leading to higher efficacy beliefs (e.g., Nicolaides et al., 2014), promoting a social context that facilitates trust, cooperation, safety, and mutual support (e.g., Drescher et al., 2014), and cultivating a shared sense of purpose (Mathieu et al., 2015).

Furthermore, it is puzzling that another key component relevant to the conceptualization and understanding of shared leadership, namely its voluntary nature, has been neglected in Choudhury and Maupin’s (2025) framework. Shared leadership is conceptualized as a process created by the voluntary contributions of team members (e.g., Nicolaides et al., 2014). Hence, individual team members’ claim of informal leadership is not formally defined by a formal supervisory role, allowing them to enact leadership behaviors intermittently as situations arise, without external pressures to do so. They can easily opt in or out of claiming leadership without formalized constraints. In light of this, it is not surprising that shared leadership has been conceptualized as a team resource (Day et al., 2004) and linked to several indicators of psychological health, including flow experience (Aubé et al., 2017), increased well-being, and reduced emotional exhaustion (Klasmeier & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2024).

Summarized, Choudhury and Maupin’s (2025) assertion that shared leadership leads to demands for individual team members appears questionable in light of its conceptualization and the existing empirical evidence. We, therefore, propose extending their model by considering boundary conditions that may explain when shared leadership functions as a resource versus when it may generate demands. One crucial boundary condition, highly relevant for leadership dynamics in teams, is the behavior of the formal leader and the role of formal leadership (e.g., Morgeson et al., 2010; Zhu et al., 2018).

Issue 3: Omission of Formal Leadership

Leadership within teams can emerge from both formal and informal sources (e.g., Morgeson et al., 2010), meaning that shared leadership can co-exist with—and may even depend on—formal (i.e., vertical) leadership (Denis et al., 2012). In this sense, shared leadership is not a substitute for formal leadership but rather a parallel process alongside it. However, Choudhury and Maupin (2025) do not explicitly distinguish between formal and informal leadership. Instead, they focus solely on the demands experienced by individual team members within the context of shared leadership, while neglecting the ongoing leadership responsibilities of the formal leader. Failing to account for the influence of formal leadership (e.g., Nicolaides et al., 2014) results in an incomplete understanding of the shared leadership processes and undermines the potential benefits of integrating both formal and shared leadership.

In fact, prior research has demonstrated that formal leadership can actively stimulate shared leadership processes (e.g., Chiu et al., 2016) and positively influence their outcomes (e.g., Chiu et al., 2021). Additionally, formal leaders adapt their leadership behavior in response to team-level shared leadership dynamics (Klasmeier et al., 2025). This is a critical oversight in the paper by Choudhury and Maupin (2025), as formal leadership serves as a key resource that benefits both individual team members and the team as a whole (e.g., Bakker et al., 2023; Montano et al., 2023). Taken together, Choudhury and Maupin’s (2025) paper omits established research and fails to address the growing call in the leadership literature to integrate both vertical and shared leadership to develop a more comprehensive understanding of team leadership (Denis et al., 2012; Zhu et al., 2018).

In conclusion, we propose extending the framework put forward by Choudhury and Maupin (2025) to address three key issues that currently limit its contribution to the current theorizing on shared leadership: (1) by acknowledging the multilevel nature of shared leadership, (2) integrating a resource-oriented perspective, and (3) situating shared leadership within the context of formal leadership.