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We combined the topics of shared leadership, which is a relatively new form of leadership adopted in virtual team management, and tie strength, which affects members' behaviors in online communities, to investigate how they are correlated in a social media context. We conducted 2 experiments involving 64 participants; the first involved close friends and the second, new encounters. The 2 relationship contexts were compared to explore the effects of interpersonal relationships on shared leadership behaviors. Results indicated that in the high-tie-strength (close friend) context, there was a positive correlation between tie strength and directive leadership, whereas in the low-tie-strength (new encounter) context, there was a positive correlation between tie strength and both positive feedback and social leadership. Thus, in the context of team management on social media websites, we suggest that people adjust their leadership behavior according to the interpersonal relationships exhibited among team members.

Keywords: shared leadership, tie strength, social media, friendship strength, new encounter, virtual team management, interpersonal relationships.

Shared leadership in virtual teams has attracted increasing interest from researchers (D'Innocenzo, Mathieu, & Kukenberger, 2016; Zhu, Kraut, & Kittur, 2012). Compared with the traditional vertical-leadership-based group, in which the role of the leader is assigned to a specific individual, leadership emanates from group members in a shared-leadership-based group (Wang, Waldman, & Zhang, 2014). The group members influence each other and any of the members can contribute to leading the group, whereas vertical leadership typically involves one leader influencing the other group members. In favorable shared leadership conditions, group members maintain equal status (Pearce & Manz, 2005).

Pearce and Conger (2002, p. 1) defined shared leadership as "a dynamic, interactive influence process [with] serial emergence" of more than one leader taking charge over the life of the group discussion to achieve the group goals. In a virtual group context, shared leadership behavior was found to be a better predictor of the effectiveness of the group's work than was traditional leadership behavior (Pearce, Yoo, & Alavi, 2004). Past research on shared leadership has usually involved the consideration of interpersonal ties. Some scholars have conceptualized shared leadership in terms of properties incorporated in social network theory, including density (Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007) and cohesion (Wang et al., 2014). For example, Carson et al. defined the...

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