Shared leadership and relationship conflict in teams: The moderating role of team power base diversity

Shared leadership in teams is believed to be beneficial for team effectiveness. Yet recent empirical evidence shows that it may not always bring positive effects. On the one hand, the team leadership literature suggests that shared leadership allows for frequent interactions among members, improving intrateam harmony and reducing conflicts. On the other hand, the team power literature suggests that frequent influence interactions among multiple leaders can form an arena in which members fight over their power turfs, thereby triggering conflict. Drawing on dominance complementarity theory, we suggest that team power base diversity—the variety in power bases among team members from which they derive their informal influence—is an important contingency that moderates the impact of shared leadership on relationship conflict to influence team performance. In a sample of 70 project-based teams, we find support for the proposition that at high levels of team power base diversity, shared leadership has a positive downstream effect on team performance through reduced team relationship conflict. We discuss the contributions to knowledge about shared leadership and highlight practical implications for temporary teams with no formally designated leaders.

Keywords: teams; shared leadership; relationship conflict; power base diversity; team performance

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