| Leadership scholars have proposed a number of different constructs to describe those situations where leadership is enacted by the members of a team, instead of concentrated on a single individual (e.g., shared leadership, distributed leadership, collective leadership, democratic leadership, team leadership, co-leadership, self-managed teams, participative leadership, and relational leadership). In recent years, the streams of research associated to each of these terms have started to recognize the similarities among terms and even to use them interchangeably. This dissertation proposes that much can be learned about the complex and overarching phenomenon of collective leadership when looking at the differences between these streams of research, instead of simply assuming that these constructs (shared, distributed, democratic, etc.) are interchangeable. In fact, the careful study of the literature evidences the existence of important differences between the models proposed by scholars, which can be grouped in two themes: the characteristics of the leadership pattern and the evolution of the leadership pattern.Building on the differences observed, two dimensions are proposed that define the pattern of collective leadership in teams, leadership sharedness and leadership distribution. In this dissertation, I seek to bridge the gap in the literature by incorporating these two dimensions into the collective leadership model to better our understanding of this phenomenon. In particular, a new operationalization is proposed that may help advance the study of the relationship between multiple forms of collective leadership and team performance. Sharedness and distribution are assessed using a social networks analysis for a sample of 26 committees.Hypotheses are proposed that test research assumptions and propositions that relate multiple dimensions of the collective leadership pattern with team effectiveness. The results of these hypotheses confirm that both dimensions of collective leadership are significantly related to different measures of team effectiveness and need to be included in the model and operationalization of collective leadership. |
