An analysis of shared leadership, diversity, and team creativity in an e-learning environment

• This study suggests a team creativity model including shared leadership, diversity, and knowledge sharing.
• To sophistically measure shared leadership, we employed a social network approach by calculating density.
• Our results showed that shared leadership and knowledge sharing positively contributed to team creativity.
• Knowledge sharing played a partially mediating role between shared leadership and team creativity.
• Knowledge sharing had a fully mediating effect between gender diversity and team creativity.

In response to rapid change and fierce competition, creativity is an imperative factor to develop and implement innovation. Hence, most firms have pursued diverse strategies to promote individual and team creativity in the workplace. Shared leadership is a voluntarily, informally emergent structure beyond vertical leadership. A team is composed of individual members, and shared leadership and demographic diversity exist within the team, influencing team creativity. In this respect, we introduced shared leadership as a social network perspective as well as diversity into a team creativity model. In sum, we examined the influence of shared leadership and diversity on knowledge sharing and the subsequent effects on team creativity. Our results showed that role diversity directly influences team creativity, with shared leadership and knowledge sharing positively contributing to team creativity. Thus, knowledge sharing had a partially mediating role between shared leadership and team creativity. Apart from our hypotheses, the present results implied that if gender diversity (as a differentiated factor) is not a minority status, knowledge sharing may have a fully mediating effect between gender diversity and team creativity.