Uncovering The Dark Side Of Shared Leadership

Traditionally,leadership research supposes that leadership sources from "heroic"leaders.However,current business environment is increasingly dynamic and complex,and more and more organizations are likely to employ falt and team-based structure to work.It is difficult to rely on individual leaders under this condition.In order to relieve the pressure of indivudal leaders and to sitimulate the leadership capacity of teams or groups,shared leadership,a leadership type emphasizes the leadership responsibilities are shared by multiple team menbers was born.A body of studies have explored the effects of shared leadership,and most of them found that shared leadship is positily related to multiple team processes and outcome indicators.Nevertheless,managers have found shared leadership may have negative impacts in several cases.So the negative effects of shared leadership are lilely to be neglected by current research.This study aims to explore the negative effects of shared leadership and its boundary contexts.Drawing on the pespective of hierarchical functionalism,this study supposes that shared leadership may enhance power struggle within team,which negatively influences team performance,and in turn indirectly decreasing team performance through power struggle.This study also emphasizes that functional background diversity and transactional leadership may moderate the negative effects of shared leadership on power struggle and team performance,such that this negative effect is weaken when functional background diversity is high,and this negative effect is stronger when team leader's tranctional leadership is high.Three substudies were conducted to examine these hypotheses.In the first substudy,one experiments was conducted to examine the effects of shared leadership on power struggle and team performance.The experiment was conducted with a sample of 40 three-person groups.The results of experiment supported that shared leadership can enhance power struggle,and power struggle can attenuate team performance.Moreover,the hypothesis about the indirect relationship between shared leadership and team performance through power struggle was also supported in this experiment.Two other survey studies with a round-robin design were conducted to explore boundary conditions of the nagetive effects of shared leadership.In the second substudy,data from 61 new venture teams replicated the results of the indirect relationship between shared leadership and team performance through power struggle.Furthermore,it was found that this negative indirect relationship is attenuated by functional background diversity,such that this indirect relationship is weaker when functional background diversity is high.In the third substudy,data from 46 entrepreneurship project student teams also supported that shared leadership is indirectly related to team performance through power struggle.Moreover,it was partly supported that this indirect effect is promoted by team leader's transactional leadership,such that this indirect effect is stronger when the level of transactional leadership is high.This study may contribute to relevant research in several ways.Firstly,this study challenges the traditional perpective about the effects of shared leadership by uncovering the dark side of shared leadership.Secondly,this study contributes to hierarchical functionism perspective by firstly introducing this perspective into research on shared leadership.Thirdly,this study is helpful for rethinking the relationship between diversity and intragroup conflicts by finding functional background diversity could attenuate the relationship between shared leadership and power struggle.Finally,the practical implications,limiations and furture directions of this study were discussed.