Shared leadership and performance in distributed teams: An examination of mediating mechanisms

Shared leadership has emerged as an important determinant of team performance. However, the efficacy of such leadership in facilitating effective performance in distributed contexts is little understood. We extend theory by examining how shared leadership influences performance in distributed teams. Specifically, we focus on spatial, temporal, and configurational aspects of dispersion and how shared leadership enables teams to overcome the barriers posed by these forms of dispersion. We conducted a five-month study of ten distributed teams to examine shared versus concentrated leadership. Results of the study suggest that highly distributed teams achieve high performance when leadership influence in team coordination and monitoring processes is distributed across multiple team members. In contrast shared and concentrated leadership both seemed to facilitate high performance in less distributed teams. Further, we found that shared leadership in coordination processes was particularly important in facilitating effective communication patterns and, ultimately, high performance. The implications of our findings for theory are discussed.