Shared leadership

Shared leadership is a leadership style that broadly distributes leadership responsibility, such that people within a team and organization lead each other. It has frequently been compared to horizontal leadership, distributed leadership, and collective leadership and is most contrasted with more traditional "vertical" or "hierarchical" leadership that resides predominantly with an individual instead of a group. Shared leadership can be defined in a number of ways, but all definitions describe a similar phenomenon: team leadership by more than just an appointed leader. Below are examples from researchers in this field: Yukl (1989): "Individual members of a team engaging in activities that influence the team and other team members." Pearce and Sims (2001): "Leadership that emanates from members of teams, and not simply from the appointed leader." Pearce and Conger (2003): "A dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals and groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both." They also added that "this influence process often involves peer, or lateral, influence and at other times involves upward or downward hierarchical influence". Carson, Tesluck, and Marrone (2007): "An emergent team property that results from the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members." Bergman, Rentsch, Small, Davenport, and Bergman (2012): "Shared leadership occurs when two or more members engage in the leadership of the team in an effort to influence and direct fellow members to maximize team effectiveness." Hoch, J. E. (2013): "Reflects a situation where multiple team members engage in leadership and is characterized by collaborative decision-making and shared responsibility for outcomes." Shared leadership is also commonly thought of as the "serial emergence" of multiple leaders over the life of a team, stemming from interactions among team members in which at least one team member tries to influence other members or the team in general.