Abstract

Shared leadership is defined as “an emergent team property of mutual influence and shared responsibility among team members whereby they lead each other toward goal achievement” (Wang, Waldman, & Zhang, 2014). Teams which show high levels of shared leadership have consistently been associated with better performance, as well as other desirable outcomes (Nicolaides et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2014). This leadership structure of teams implies the capacity of the team to make the best use of the available competences among their team members. As such, a team in which leadership is shared could be explained through its different team members enacting leader and follower roles at different points in time as required (Adriasola & Lord, 2020; Lord, Day, Zaccaro, Avolio, & Eagly, 2017). The cues for an individual to emerge as a leader might be determined by a combination between bottom up as well as top down processes. As such, individual’s own unique competencies, characteristics of the task, other team members or processes involving the whole team provide critical context for shared leadership emergence. Taking a bottom up perspective, team members bring to the team their own particular construction of the world, which impact their own functioning; but which might influence dyadic and team level processes too. Theory of personal construct argues that individuals unique construing of events have a critical role in driving interpretation, decision making and behavior of individuals (Fransella, 2003). In interactions, this construction processes become more complex, as others might impact the individual’s situational construction (e.g. eliciting certain aspects of the personal construct); but also where each individual’s construction process will play a role in the social process involving others (Fransella, 2003). Adriasola and Lord (2020) proposed an identity-based structural model for shared leadership, whereby they explain how team members’ identity compositions relating their leader and follower identities as well as processes associated to their individual self, are relevant for dyadic and team level processes, as well as being influenced by processes at these levels too. In this context, they argue that individual’s leader and follower self-schemas, as activated by other team members (e.g. potential dyadic partners) as well as the team (e.g. norms and group prototypes about leadership) can enhance or hinder their capacity to switch between leader and follower roles. As such, the self- schemas held by individuals (e.g. implicit leadership or followership prototypes), as well as the dyadic and collective constructions (e.g. group prototype of leadership and leadership norms) will provide critical context for shared leadership emergence. From a top down perspectives, group prototypes and norms will be critical. Group prototypes refer to the typical, the exemplar members of a group. It basically refers to the agreement of team members about everyday features of a group and help decide members belongingness status (Hogg & Terry, 2000). As such, a clear group prototype clarifies attributes, attitudes and behaviors that are associated to such groups and constitute the way team members enact their collective identity. Related to prototypes, group norms define those shared expectations team members have for each other involving the acceptability and non-acceptability of behaviors (Hackman, 1987). Norms have very strong influences on the range of behaviors that team members can engage in, tend to emerge very quickly and to become highly stable and difficult to change (Hackman, 2003). However, how do schemas, identities, and prototypes held by individual team members affect the emergence of various group norms related to shared leadership? And further, to what extent individual’s self-schemas about leadership are modified by team norms when a team develop shared leadership norms? In newly formed teams, individuals arrive with their own self-schemas about leadership and followership, which over time and due to the richness of team dynamic are likely to both influence team norms and be influenced by them. As such, a relevant and critical question relates to understand how the shared leadership norms emerge, and to what extent the individual team members’ leadership schemas impact the generation of such norms. On the other hand, it has been argued that shared leadership norms would impact individual team members’ schemas about leadership. This paper will address these questions theoretically focusing on leader and follower identity and the extent to which team member’s self-schemas about leadership affect how a team’s early emergence of (shared) leadership norms occur, and how clarity or ambiguity of group leadership prototypes might relate to conflict. Preliminary analysis of data collected in undergraduate teams working on a consultancy assignment over the semester will be presented and discussed.