title: Shared Leadership: Exploring Measurement and Behavioural Optimisation
Creators: name: Spedding, Jason T
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Shared leadership
subject: distributed leadership
subject: measurement development
subject: SEM

description: Despite the proliferation of research investigating shared leadership practices over the last two decades, there remains little consensus on the appropriate methods to conceptualise and measure these shared influence behaviours. This lack of consistency hinders both the advancement of robust theory regarding the benefits of adopting more shared leadership team dynamics, but also prevents the development of interventions or training designed to enhance specific shared leadership behaviours which result in subsequent organisational and team effectiveness. To this end, the current thesis seeks to identify the specific behaviours which underlie these shared leadership processes. Initial chapters highlight the problems with historical “command-and-control” leadership practices, whilst demonstrating the growing demand for more shared leadership practices within modern organisations (Chapter 1). Following this, an in-depth review of the historical perspectives regarding effective leadership is conducted (Chapter 2). Despite (some) early attempts to investigate the potential for sharing leadership influence, or research which posited the benefits of adopting a more shared approach to team leadership; this review found limited empirical evidence examining such processes. Following this, the scientific literature focused on shared leadership was reviewed (Chapter 3). Exploring contemporary research demonstrated that shared leadership theory could be delineated based on the measures, methods, and conceptualisations used to define the shared leadership construct. These differing approaches included theory drawing on previously researched leadership theory (the traditional perspective), theory which used social-network methods to measure shared leadership (the network-relational perspective), and theory that adopted a team level problem focused approach to defining shared leadership (the functionalist perspective). Despite these competing perspectives, there remained limited evidence to suggest which of these ‘best captured’ these shared leadership behaviours. Additionally, it was found the literature was characterised by what Kozlowski et al. (2016) termed “idiosyncratic microtheories”, with minimal research building on previous theory to generate insights regarding these important team influence processes. To ameliorate this gap, an initial study was conducted to test 11 previously validated shared leadership scales to determine which of these best captures these shared influence processes (based on model fit and strength of association with team effectiveness; Study 1). Findings presented in Study 1 were largely inconclusive, with no single measure demonstrating a clear advantage over any other (with the exception of measures drawn from a network-relational perspective which were found to be unsatisfactory). The inadequacy of network-relational measures of shared leadership was surprising given previous meta-analysis had suggested these measures exhibited the strongest relationship to beneficial team outcomes (D’Innocenzo et al., 2016; Nicolaides et al., 2014). These unexpected results were further investigated (Study 2). Study 2 presented an in-depth analysis of different social-network measures of shared leadership and their associations to important team benefits such as team effectiveness, employee engagement, and team adaptivity. Although some significant relationships were observed the effect sizes were found to be small. These limited effects combined with weak associations to the other included measures of shared leadership inferred that these measures were not accurately assessing shared leadership. A series of follow-up post-hoc analyses were conducted to explore these findings, it was tentatively proposed that these social-network measures of shared leadership were assessing a construct of ‘shared leadership visibility’, with recommendations made for future research explore this hypothesis. Collectively, these measurement analyses (i.e., Study 1 and Study 2) failed to conclusively demonstrate a preferable measure to assess the shared leadership construct. Therefore, it was posited a more parsimonious scale could be developed (Study 3). Utilising 153 items from the 10 measures of shared leadership examined in Study 1 (note that the social network of shared leadership was not included in subsequent analysis), machine learning techniques were employed to identify the six shared leadership behaviours which were most strongly related to perceptions of team effectiveness. These six items were aggregated to form the Shared Leadership Behavioural Scale (SLB-6) Following the development of the SLB-6, follow-up analyses were performed to validate the psychometric properties on two independent samples (Study 4). In addition to examining the validity of the SLB-6, the relationships exhibited between these shared leadership behaviours and related motivational (i.e., employee engagement) and team effectiveness outcomes (i.e., team potency) was demonstrated. It was found that the SLB-6 provided an excellent goodness-of-fit to the data collected, and was recommended for use in future works to assess shared leadership behaviours (especially when assessing outcomes of team effectiveness). This thesis concludes with a general discussion of these collective findings, including the limitations, and avenues for future advancements in this field (Chapter 9).