How Does Leadership Sharing Promote Collective Orientations among Team Members

• In Event: 492 - Regular Session. Group Processes

Abstract

This study investigates effects of leadership sharing on collective orientations among team members. The source of sharing is a team leader’s transformational leadership and the target of distribution is team members. Collective orientations of interest are shared responsibility and team efficacy. We postulate that when a team effectively distributes its leader’s leadership style to members, the members who successfully share the leadership style of their leader develop collective orientations. We argue further that when members fully adopt their leader’s leadership style, the effect of the source leadership by the leader on collective orientations become spurious, because the shared leadership among members fully mediate the source leadership. We tested these theoretical hypotheses with 962 team members working in 142 teams at Korean firms. As predicted, the effect of the team leader’s leadership style on collective orientations was fully mediated by members’ distributed leadership. We discussed the theoretical and practical implications of our findings in more detail.

Authors

• Jeongkoo Yoon, EWHA Woman's University

• Yoon Cho, Ewha School of Management