As leaders struggle with growing pressures in today’s fast-paced workplace, a change is being made in the way leadership responsibilities are distributed within organizations. One Society for Human Resource Management (SIOP) leader says shared team leadership is the new approach that is influencing the way team members operate to their full potential.
“The heroic single leader is no longer congruent with the burdening demands of today’s leadership,” SIOP Fellow J. Richard Hackman, Edgar Pierce professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard University, stated in a press release.
Fortunately, he said, scholars and practitioners are recognizing that a shift is taking place within the workforce from traditional solo team leadership to shared team leadership.
Hackman will elaborate on the concept of shared team leadership during his keynote presentation at this year’s Leading Edge Consortium being held October 22-23 at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay.
“The most important conditions for effective shared team leadership include a team that is a mature and reasonably bounded group,” Hackman stated. “They must know each other’s strengths and weaknesses in order to identify who to go to for specific tasks. The second condition is being interdependent on one another for some specific shared purpose or goal. Research has shown that shared team leadership is like an audio amplifier. If you have really effective shared leadership, so much more is possible, but it can also generate negative results if not used under the right conditions.”
