Shared Leadership Works in Germany, Too

Except on this Web site, I never see the term "decision by committee" used as a positive. Yet self-directed work teams have been highly successful in many situations. Whether you are a believer in group decision-making probably rests on your personal experience with such. If efforts you witnessed were marked by conflicts, or produced bland initiatives because everyone was avoiding conflict, you may wish the boss had just made the decision. Indeed, that might have worked out better. If, however, you have served on self-managed teams that created pleasant working conditions and measurable successes, you likely think group decision-making is great.

But maybe you are like me, having served on or supported both successful and unsuccessful teams. We would have a nuanced answer to the question, "Does shared leadership work?" We would say, "It depends." It depends on whether the team had all the right members and supporters, a clear goal, enough information and time, a team charter, and used formal decision-making techniques. If so, the team works great. If not, it fails. Nothing earth-shattering there.

Julia Hoch, Craig Pearce, and Linda Welzel recently added more details to that list of dependencies. Hoch is a professor of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State Univ.; Pearce is at The Institute for Innovative Leadership, Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Welzel is at Technical University Dresden in Germany. Her country is a critical player in this study. Overall, research has shown a positive impact from sharing tasks generally performed by a team leader among the various team members instead. However, the authors write in the Journal of Personnel Psychology, all of those studies were conducted in North America, mostly in the United States. And we Americans differ from much of the world by scoring as a whole very high on the value we place on individualism, according to a commonly used scale. The team wanted to know whether things would come out differently in Germany, which scores 25 points lower on the 100-point scale.

Hoch, Pearce, and Welzel surveyed 96 knowledge workers on 26 teams and their leaders in a German consulting firm. The workers were asked to rate how much their teammates performed behaviors from a list of, coincidentally, 26 typical leader behaviors. They were also asked how well they and their teammates coordinated their efforts, and the researchers calculated the age range for each team. Six to eight weeks later, the workers' bosses were asked to rate their teams from 0% to 100% on "the quantity of performance, quality of performance, and budget performance, as well as the overall performance of the team."

On average, shared leadership was linked to higher team performance in Germany, too. Add another data point to my recent crusade about people being more alike than different.

The details complicate the picture, however. Shared leadership apparently helped in a big way teams that did not have much variation in age or who reported poor coordination. In teams with more age range, where the older members likely took on informal leadership roles, or those where the coordination was good, shared leadership had a slightly negative relationship with performance. The researchers hypothesized that trying to maintain good coordination at the same time as performing leadership tasks took too much mental effort. When teams had both age similarity and low coordination, or their opposites, the effects were more pronounced.

So if your team has Boomer, Gen X, and Gen Y members, or you're hearing no complaints about coordination, you don't need to share leadership, right? Well, no, not right.

The study did not ask about the quality of the shared leadership, just whether it existed. It did not ask whether teams had charters and written procedures. It also isolated only a couple of factors. Your team might have a lot of other factors that argue for sharing leadership. I also should note that this was the first study to look at this combination of factors; the number of teams in it was small; and almost all the subjects were male. Furthermore, the study results suggest the risk of harm from introducing shared leadership is balanced by a much larger potential payoff. In fact, Hoch, Pearce, and Welzel specifically state, "our results support the value for strategic shared leadership training in organizations."

The leadership behaviors they are talking about appear in the survey the team members used. For example, the subjects were asked to rate how much their team members:

• "provide a clear vision of whom and what our team is."
• "are driven by higher purposes or ideals."
• "encourage me to rethink ideas which had never been questioned before."
• "seek a broad range of perspectives when solving problems."
• "encourage me to go above and beyond what is normally expected of one (e.g., extra effort)."
• "have clear agreements and stick to those when we work together."
• "recommend more compensation" if the person performs well.
• "give me positive feedback when I perform well."
• "decide on my performance goals together with me."
• "encourage me to search for solutions to my problems without supervision."
•  "encourage me to learn new things."
•  "encourage me to work together with other individuals who are part of the team."

As with last week's post on servant leadership, I realize I am suggesting managers delegate much of their authority. The question again becomes, what is important to you? Do you want to be seen as a powerful leader? Or do you want your team to be the best it can be? Though the two are not necessarily exclusive, these studies and many others on empowerment show they often are. Over time, with proper implementation, I think gaining power by giving it up is the most powerful and least stressful way to success.

Action Item: Print this out and pick one item from the list above. Write a plan for encouraging that behavior among your employees or teammates over the next month. Next month, repeat. Guess why I only gave you 12 of the survey items!

Source: Hoch, J., C. Pearce, and L. Welzel (2010), "Is the Most Effective Team Leadership Shared? The Impact of Shared Leadership, Age Diversity, and Coordination on Team Performance," Journal of Personnel Psychology 9(3):105.