Shared leadership effectiveness : perceived task complexity as moderator

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the effect of shared leadership on both quantity and quality of team performance, predicting that shared leadership enhances performance by affecting quantity (level of performance) as well as quality (team errors). In addition, this paper also investigates the role of perceived task complexity in moderating the effect of sharing leadership on team performance. Design/methodology/approach: In total, 26 teams (N= 78) were asked to work on an interdependent team-task, where they engaged in a laboratory team decision-making exercise. Findings: Results revealed that teams sharing leadership made fewer errors. They achieved higher levels of quality of performance. As predicted, this effect was stronger when team members perceived the task as highly complex, even though objective task difficulty was constant. Research limitations/implications: This study extends current literature on shared leadership by documenting that sharing the lead in teams can also improve the quality of team performance and that perceived complexity of tasks is an important moderator of this effect. Practical implications: Based on the findings, influencing perceptions of task complexity can be considered as an important strategy to stimulate shared leadership in teams. Originality/value: Using social network approach, the authors showed that shared leadership is an important tool for preventing team errors and offer a new explanation for inconsistent findings from recent meta-analyses by showing that perceived task complexity moderates the effects of shared leadership. Additionally, this study offers an original team task for investigating shared leadership in teams.