Exploring antecedents and outcomes of shared leadership in a creative context: A mixed-methods approach

Leadership research, traditionally focused on the behavior of an appointed/elected leader, is rapidly shifting towards a distributed, group process form of leadership known as “shared leadership”. Since empirical research supporting this approach is limited, we extend prior work exploring antecedents and outcomes of shared leadership and develop a framework examining its role as a mediator between task and team characteristics (internal team environment, task cohesion and task ambiguity) and task and team-level consequences (task satisfaction, team satisfaction and team performance). Analyzing experimental data through a mixed-methods approach (quantitative via regression-based analysis and qualitative using thematic analysis for unstructured data in NVivo 10), our results indicate that, in the context of a creative task, internal team environment and task cohesion predict shared leadership, which, in turn, determines task satisfaction. We discuss implications of these findings and future paths for exploring shared leadership antecedents and outcomes.