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Teams have become a way of life in most e.g., organizations, and employees need to know how to work effectively within teams (Han and Beyerlein, 2016). Preparation for this begins in educational institutions, which increasingly use new types of collaborative tools to promote team-based learning (Beyerlein and Han, 2016; Han et al., 2016). Students work in teams, share perspectives and combine their knowledge, skills and abilities to solve complex problems (Funk, 2014; Kolb, 1999). In the context of student teams, there is not often a single leader, so advocacy of the benefits of adopting shared leadership has been growing (Pearce et al., 2009). However, there seems to have been little research on the ways in which students share leadership collaboratively to enhance team performance. Scholars emphasize the concept of shared leadership (i.e. collective leadership, distributed leadership) because it can affect team effectiveness, especially as teams become more complex (Day et al., 2004; Marks et al., 2001; Pearce and Sims, 2000). The literature also has suggested that shared leadership can affect both team and individual outcomes (Neck and Manz, 2007, Nicolaides et al., 2014), and that vertical teams demonstrate a more positive influence on team-level performance than traditional hierarchical leader teams (Carson et al., 2007). However, the fundamental question of what shared leadership means and how it relates to team performance has not been clearly answered.
The concept of shared leadership includes both task-oriented and relation-oriented components (Grille and Kauffeld, 2015); however, empirical studies of the two dimensions of shared leadership have been rare. Our study adds value because it is the first study to combine the two dimensions of Grille and Kauffeld’s (2015) shared leadership scales. Task-oriented shared leadership refers to the shared concern among members for achievement of high standards of performance. A task process consists of the activities that team members deliberately execute to achieve a goal including coordination activities, such as organizing work, assigning work to team members and explaining rules and standard procedures (Yukl, 2006). Under shared leadership, members work collectively to facilitate group processes and improve performance (Kolb, 2011). In addition, relation-oriented team processes enhance the emotional strength of a team, resulting in both a positive team environment and increased performance (Mannix and Neale,...