Shared Leadership and Team Effectiveness: An Investigation of Whether and When in Engineering Design Teams

Frontiers in Psychology

Kathryn Cormican¹  Qiong Wu² 

[1] Lero – The Irish Software Research Centre, School of Engineering, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland;School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China;

关键词: shared leadership;    team effectiveness;    project life cycle;    social network analysis;    engineering design teams;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.569198

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Shared leadership is lauded to be a performance-enhancing approach with applications in many management domains. It is conceptualized as a dynamic team process as it evolves over time. However, it is surprising to find that there are no studies that have examined its temporally relevant boundary conditions for the effectiveness of the team. Contributing to an advanced understanding of the mechanism of shared leadership in engineering design teams, this research aims to investigate whether shared leadership is positively related to team effectiveness and when shared leadership is more likely to be effective. Using a field sample of 119 individuals in 26 engineering design teams from China and the technique of social network analysis, we found that, consistent with cognate studies, shared leadership is positively related to team effectiveness when measured in terms of team task performance and team viability. Moreover, by integrating the project life cycle as a moderator, this study is among the first to investigate the temporal factors, for the effectiveness of shared leadership. The result shows that the stage of the project life cycle moderates the positive shared leadership-team effectiveness relationship, such that this association is stronger at the early phase than at the later phase of the project. Overall, these findings offer insightful thoughts to scholars in the field of shared leadership and bring practical suggestions for project managers in business who seek to implement best practice in organizations toward high team effectiveness.

【 授权许可】

CC BY