Abstract:

With the increasing external competition faced by firms in today’s business world, organizations have relied more on team-based management to confront with the environmental uncertainty and the rapid changes. Vertical leadership, a top-down process wherein a formal leader who possesses the managerial role influences team members through his/her authority, fails to provide efficient solutions to all kinds of emerging issues in such an organizational context. Therefore, shared leadership, which refers a dynamic and interactive influence process among members in group aiming to lead one another mutually to achieve group or organizational goal, has received burgeoning scholarly attention in both the leadership literature and the team management research. Despite the increasing interests in shared leadership, very a few researchers have systematically examined shared leadership in the organizational science. To extend shared leadership research, several research purposes were included in the present study. Specifically, we first investigated the effects of shared leadership on team information exchange and team passionate tone. Second, we tested the mediating roles of these two team process variables in the relationships between shared leadership between team performance and team creativity. Finally, we examined the moderating effects of environmental uncertainty on the mediational relationships between shared leadership and team outputs via team information exchange and team passionate tone, respectively.

Key words: shared leadership, team outputs, team information exchange, team passionate tone, environmental uncertainty