The Dynamics of Shared Leadership

Author:

Lender, Taylor Marie

Area of Honors:

Psychology

Degree:

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type:

Thesis

Thesis Supervisors:

Dr. Samuel Todd Hunter, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Jeffrey M Love, Thesis Honors Advisor

Keywords:

shared leadership
transfromational leadership
transactional leadership
trust
transparency
viability
gender

Abstract:

Shared leadership is an emerging style that involves a team of leaders. This leadership construct can help minimize the demands of leadership and increase leadership effectiveness. Since shared leadership is a relatively new topic, there has been minimal research conducted on shared leadership, and specifically, the construction and dynamics of shared leadership teams. This study presents a field study that explores the dynamics of leadership in terms of trust, relational transparency, and viability. We hypothesized that leaders who rate their leader teammates high on transparency also rate their leader teammates high on trust. We also hypothesized that perceived trust among shared leadership teams is positively correlated with perceived viability. Our results indicated support for our first hypothesis; perceived relational transparency among shared leadership teams did positively correlate with perceived trust. Our second hypothesis was not supported. We conducted multivariate linear regression analysis to test our third hypothesis that female, outdoor leaders positively correlated with adoption of transactional leadership style, while male outdoor leaders positively correlated with adoption of transformational leadership style. Our results did not indicate support for the third hypothesis. These results provide insight into the dynamics of shared leader teams that may be useful for the training of these teams.