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Shared leadership has gained considerable popularity over the past few years, but it remains inconsistently defined and measured. This has been mainly caused by relatively little empirical research. Future research is needed to compare the effects of shared leadership in various types of teams such as knowledge-based work team, self-managed work team, and task force team. It is concluded that organizations can utilize shared leadership to establish strategies to enhance team performance, quality of products, and positive change which will eventually lead to improved organizational performance
INTRODUCTION
Effective leadership is highly correlated with perceptions of organizational effectiveness and has been studied as one of the key variables that relates to overall group or team effectiveness (Cohen & Bailey, 1997; Kolb, 1996). Past research for group and team effectiveness has mainly focused on a single formal leader and emphasized that person's individual characteristics and behaviors. Leadership from a single individual has provided important implications for the relationship between leadership and team effectiveness, but this approach is limited in that it only focuses on the relationship between one leader and the followers (Yukl, 2002).
Research is currently under way to overcome this limitation, and research involving team leadership is no exception. Many theories about team leadership were proposed in the past, and the concept of lateral leadership rather than hierarchical leadership within a group began to attract the interest of scholars (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003). Academic research and the practical implications about lateral and collective leadership managed by team members have arisen during the past two decades. "Shared leadership" is a representative subject of this research. Previous studies have generally defined shared leadership as an emerging process of mutual influence, where team members share in the leadership function of a team (Pearce & Sims, 2002). Still, this idea of shared leadership offers considerable room for further study (Pearce, Conger, & Locke, 2007).
A self-managed work team is one of the important aspects of shared leadership. Organizations often have this type of structure because such a team allows them to operate effectively and quickly cope with any rapid changes (Ancona, 1990). Accordingly, interest in leadership within a team environment is increasing, although questions about whether or not traditional leadership models fit this concept of self- managed teams...