Team Composition, Distributed Leadership, and Performance: It’s Good to Share

Abstract

The contemporary work environment encourages new models of leadership that support influential behavior across teams. Leadership shared in this way improves team effectiveness and performance and is of interest to both scholars and practitioners. We examine shared leadership influences in the presence of other characteristics that distinguish teams, namely, team size and sex diversity. Using hierarchical multiple regression tests on information gathered from 241 teams during a strategy simulation exercise, we find evidence of a positive relationship between shared leadership and performance over and above the influence of team size and sex diversity. Additionally, we dimensionalize performance to examine impacts of team characteristics on different desirable outcomes and find that team size has a positive relationship with financial performance but a negative relationship with strategic performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.