Flexibly responding to changes and running organizations more effectively are emerging as important factors for survival as corporate competition has become fiercer in the midst of today’s rapidly changing, more complex, uncertain business environme...
Flexibly responding to changes and running organizations more effectively are emerging as important factors for survival as corporate competition has become fiercer in the midst of today’s rapidly changing, more complex, uncertain business environment. More companies have used teams as strategic units in order to carry out tasks to enhance organizational effectiveness. Thus, the leadership within a team has been receiving attention, but the scope of the leadership that one person can exercise is limited. In this regard, it is necessary to consider which is more desirable, one leader or more than two leaders at the same time in a team-based organizational structure.
This study examined the effects of shared leadership on team effectiveness and analyzed the effects of shared leadership on team effectiveness through the mediating effects of team learning behavior in order to present the implications of what should be emphasized for leadership, which is crucial in managing organizations. To this end, office workers with a permanent position in large corporations were surveyed and the data complied was analyzed using SPSS 20.0 and AMOS 18.0. The results follow.
First, shared leadership had a positive relationship with team innovativeness and team satisfaction. Team innovativeness was higher in R&D than other fields.
Second, team learning behavior partly mediated between shared leadership and team innovativeness and between shared leadership and team satisfaction. The results of the analyses of the mediating effect of experimentation, reflective communication and codification, the factors of team learning behavior, showed that reflective communication and codification did not mediate between shared leadership and team satisfaction. The results of this study have the implications below.
First, team members should be able to collaborate toward a common goal in order that the power structure of a team can change from vertical to horizontal leadership and shared leadership can be promoted. There have been no problems in leading a team or accomplishing a goal in a current leader-driven team structure. However, shared leadership, which enables individual team members to exercise their expertise, is strongly needed to respond flexibly to increasingly diverse and complicated business climate and enhance team effectiveness. For shared leadership to be revitalized, team members are required to propose and carry out projects actively, sharing duties with one another and being cooperative within a team. In this way, active shared leadership will lead to even more successful implementation of teams.
Second, improvement in systems and organizational support should be offered in order to encourage shared leadership and team learning behavior within a team. Overall systems and human resources management processes such as evaluation and rewards should be followed to create an environment where team learning, the suggestions and performance of individual members for growth, and demonstration of leadership are ensured. Individual growth can be achieved when there is accurate evaluation of the contribution to company success of the performance of employees and their teams as well as clear feedback and rewards for the results and improvements made. In particular, evaluation systems must be established for precise evaluation and feedback of individual and organizational performance.
In addition, individual members should be empowered so as to exhibit leadership with expertise in their work. An individual in a formal position of power makes all the decisions in a vertical leadership system, which has been the most dominant so far. However, systems that grant authorities to informal leaders should operate by more companies in order to have shared leadership.