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

Purpose: Globalisation and the increased complexity of organisations create the need for alternative leadership approaches that can harness the collective intellectual capital that exists within the dispersed employees of organisations. Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative 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. The study explored the perspectives of 12 purposively sampled internationally dispersed team members, who represented three different functional nonformal teams. Findings/results: As dispersion of teams increases, some traditional leadership approaches become less effective. Shared leadership, however, has greater effects on team performance when team dispersion increases. Practical implications: The study offers a theoretical framework of leadership in internationally dispersed non-formal teams, which serves as a basis 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. Participants represented nine nationalities, dispersed across eight countries, on four continents. Originality/value: Studies into shared leadership have 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 provides insight into how non-formal leaders can facilitate the emergence of shared leadership in the context of dispersed, non-formal teams.