Team Composition, Emergent States, and Shared Leadership Emergence on Project Teams: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Leadership is typically studied from the vantage point of a single leader with a group of followers. However, team members can also share leadership responsibility with each other (Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2004; Gibb, 1954; Morgeson, 2005). While research has suggested that shared leadership may emerge from some emergent states (Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007) and cause others (McIntyre & Foti, 2013), little is known about the personality variables that cause team members to share in leadership responsibilities and about the causal relationships between shared leadership and other emergent states. The current study uses a longitudinal sample of undergraduate students working on a group project to test hypotheses about (1) team compositional and emergent state antecedents to shared leadership emergence, and (2) emergent states that emerge from collective enactment of leadership behaviors. Results suggest that high team mean levels of psychological collectivism and extraversion or of motivation to lead are found to predict shared leadership emergence. Cohesion and trust are found to evolve simultaneously with shared leadership and shared leadership is found to predict collective efficacy. Implications for research and practice are discussed.