Leadership behaviour that facilitate shared leadership emergence in internationally dispersed non-formal teams

Abstract

Globalisation and the increased complexity of organisations creates the need for alternative leadership approaches that can harness the collective intellectual capital that exists within the dispersed employees of organisations. As dispersion of teams increase, some traditional leadership approaches become less effective. Shared leadership however, has greater effects on team performance when team dispersion increases. Studies into shared leadership increased over the past decade, however the antecedents that facilitate shared leadership are still not exhaustive, and the majority of studies have been in co-located and formal teams. This study explored how shared leadership can be facilitated in internationally dispersed non-formal teams through increased team connectedness, leader humility, empowering leadership, participative leadership, and quality leader-member exchanges. This qualitative study inductively explored the perspectives of twelve purposively sampled internationally dispersed team members, who represented three different functional non-formal teams. Semi-structured in depth interviews were conducted, after which the data was analysed using categorical aggregation and thematic analysis. The study offers a theoretical framework of leadership in internationally dispersed non-formal teams, which serve as a basic for future empirical research. It provides leaders of teams and organisations, as well as human resource practitioners with guidance on how to achieve the benefits of shared leadership of teams in this context. This study was limited to one large multi-national organisation (Hilti Corporation), which operates in the global construction and industrial sectors. Participants represented nine nationalities, dispersed across eight countries, on four continents.