Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated a strong link between shared leadership and team task performance. Despite these findings, there is still yet to emerge research on the degree to which leadership style on the part of a designated leader predicts the emergence of shared leadership in the established relationship between shared leadership and team performance. The present study aims to address this literature gap by manipulating leadership style in a teamwork study in order to observe the effect of directive versus participative leadership on the emergence of shared leadership, and its subsequent impact on team performance. Furthermore, the present study also aims to observe the proposed moderating effect of followership style, identically manipulated as proactive and reactive, on the relationship between leadership style and shared leadership. We found that shared leadership is higher when a participative rather than directive and that both individual and team task performance were positively predicted by shared leadership, though these relationships were not statistically significant.