Vertical versus shared leadership as predictors of the effectiveness of change management teams: An examination of aversive, directive, transactional, transformational, and empowering leader behaviors.

Abstract

This study investigated vertical versus shared leadership as predictors of the effective-ness of 71 change management teams. Vertical leadership stems from an appointed or formal leader of a team, whereas shared leadership (C. L. Pearce, 1997; C. L. Pearce & J. A. Conger, in press; C. L. Pearce & H. P. Sims, 2000) is a group process in which leadership is distributed among, and stems from, team members. Team effectiveness was measured approximately 6 months after the assessment of leadership and was also measured from the viewpoints of managers, internal customers, and team members. Using multiple regression, the authors found both vertical and shared leadership to be significantly related to team effectiveness ( p .05), although shared leadership appears to be a more useful predictor of team effectiveness than vertical leadership. The increasing use of empowered teams and concomitant flattening of organizational struc-tures (Mohrman, Cohen, & Mohrman, 1995) brings into question the more traditional models of leadership. What kind of leadership is more