Shared Leadership, Unshared Burdens: How Shared Leadership Structure Schema Lowers Individual Enjoyment Without Increasing Performance

Despite the growing popularity of shared leadership, there is little research on how beliefs about the benefits of shared leadership—a shared leadership structure schema (LSS)—affect individual outcomes. We address this by integrating adaptive leadership and conservation of resources theories. We apply adaptive leadership theory to hypothesize that a shared LSS leads individuals to support shared leadership by interacting more frequently and taking on interpersonal responsibility, especially when low peer engagement signals a leadership void that shared LSS members try to fill. However, adaptive leadership theory does not discuss how the tendencies motivated by shared LSS impacts members’ outcome. Therefore, we apply conservation of resources theory to hypothesize that taking on interpersonal responsibility makes frequent interactions more stressful, thereby harming individual enjoyment. Further, the demands of interpersonal responsibility reduce members’ ability to process the information acquired in interactions, which negates interaction frequency’s usual performance benefits. Together, these theories suggest that, especially when peer engagement is low, shared LSS has a negative indirect effect on enjoyment and an attenuating effect on performance through interaction frequency due to shared LSS members taking on interpersonal responsibility. We test our model using five waves of multisource data on student consulting teams. Our results extend understanding of shared LSS’s consequences to the individual level and highlight potential costs of supporting shared leadership.

Responding to the Challenge of Employee Engagement During Uncertain Times

This chapter aims to combat the challenge of employee engagement faced by organizations across the globe during this uncertain world. This theoretical study suggests a conceptual model that explores adaptive leadership to evoke employee engagement in this pandemic context. Based on the theoretical lens of social exchange theory (SET), the conceptual model of the study illustrates the role of adaptive leaders in facilitating employee development, formation of social capital, and articulation of organizational vision. This, in turn, boosts employee engagement levels, in particular affective, cognitive, and physical engagement. The rationale of the conceptual model is provided with testable propositions. This chapter extends the human resource management scholarship on how to deal with employee engagement challenge. Simultaneously, it takes aim to expand the adaptive leadership theory research by exploring its possible effect on employee engagement outcomes.

Adaptive or Transactional Leadership in Current Higher Education: A Brief Comparison

<p class="3">Higher education institutions operate in a complex environment that includes influence from external factors, new technologies for teaching and learning, globalization, and changing student demographics to name a few. Maneuvering such complexity and change requires a leadership strategy that is flexible and supportive. This paper reviews two leadership theories in reference to this need: adaptive leadership theory and transactional leadership theory. Three conceptual categories of environmental readiness, leadership complexity, and followers’ motivation are used as points of comparison for each theory. A recommendation is made for leadership strategy in higher education institutions based on this comparison.</p>