Many organizations are encouraging a shared leadership approach that meets the increased complexity of today’s working environment. It is therefore imperative for researchers to clearly comprehend the mechanism of shared leadership in teams. Contributing to the burgeoning research in the field of shared leadership, this study aims to advance our understanding along the many dimensions of the shared leadership phenomenon: its antecedents, moderators, and consequences. In this article, we provide a critical and comprehensive analysis of the extant literature and generate an integrated framework that presents seven hypotheses and five research questions. We then empirically test this framework via a systematic meta-analysis from 40 studies (team n = 3,019). Significantly, our findings reveal that the internal team environment and team heterogeneity are positively related to the emergence of shared leadership in teams. Moreover, we confirm the positive relationship between shared leadership and team outcomes. Our analysis also highlights how intragroup trust and task interdependence significantly moderate the shared leadership–team outcomes relations, with higher correlations observed in greater levels of intragroup trust, as well as larger levels of task interdependence. We also find the moderating effect of shared leadership measurement methods in such relations. Specifically, there is a stronger relationship when shared leadership is measured with social network analysis, rather than aggregating approaches. Overall, our study brings valuable insights into the shared leadership area and provides clear directions for future research.

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This research explores the relationship between shared leadership and creativity in engineering design teams. To do this, a social network perspective was adopted using four measures to assess key elements of shared leadership networks. These are (a) network density, (b) centralization, (c) efficiency and (d) strength. Data was collected from a sample of 22 engineering design teams who adopt a shared leadership approach. Our results support previous findings that the density of a shared leadership network is positively related to team creativity. In contrast, we learned that centralization exerts a negative influence on it. Moreover, while we found that there is no evidence to support a positive correlation between efficiency and team creativity, we demonstrate an inverted U-shaped relationship between strength and team creativity in a shared leadership network. These findings are important because they add to the academic debate in the shared leadership area and provide valuable insights for managers.

Sustainable management activities focus on creating efficiencies and value for organizations. Scholars advocate that evaluating and enabling appropriate management interventions can pave the way for future competitive advantage and sustainability. Knowledge management is regarded as a key organizational resource and a means of gaining a sustainable competitive advantage. This is especially important in high-tech service organizations, which are under increasing pressure to capture, process and share knowledge efficiently. While much work has been conducted to advance our knowledge on good practices, there is a dearth of empirical evidence relating to organizational level enablers for knowledge sharing. We advocate that creating the conditions conducive to knowledge sharing influences an organization’s ability to sustain a long-term competitive advantage. Therefore, this current study extends the literature on knowledge management by exploring the questions of whether and how key organizational factors impact knowledge sharing, focusing on the role of trust, communication, reward systems and leadership. To do this, we analyzed prior work and generated hypotheses relating to relevant enablers. We then operationalized these constructs via a structured data collection instrument, which consisted of 27 measurable items. Empirical data were collected from 104 team members in a high-tech service organization in Ireland. Data were analyzed using a quantitative approach, and descriptive statistics, correlations and regression analyses are presented. Our research offers a persuasive body of evidence supporting the notion that trust, communication, reward systems, and leadership strongly impact knowledge sharing in organizations. Specifically, the findings reveal that employees are more willing to share their personal knowledge with those they trust, and carefully designed communication systems can enable knowledge sharing. Reward systems play an important role in affecting employees’ motivation to share knowledge, while empowering leadership and participatory leadership are two main drivers in promoting knowledge sharing. This research addresses a relatively unexplored area, has implications for sustainable management practices relating to organizational design and provides ideas for future research studies.

PurposeThe issue of project managers’ competencies has gained much traction in practice and more recently in academic debate. However, they have become analogous to extensive wish lists where a project manager is expected to have an exhaustive list of aptitudes and capabilities. Therefore, identifying and defining the most critical competencies for project success is urgently needed. Moreover, although the vast number of studies emphasize the significance of behavioral competencies, there is a dearth of empirical research and studies within the context of information systems (IS) are scarce. Consequently, the present study aims to investigate the influence of project manager's behavioral competencies for the successful delivery of IS projects.Design/methodology/approachThis research conducted a systematic literature review (2009–2019) of 27 relevant studies incorporating 179 competencies. The authors also collected data from 121 professional IS project managers and used regression analysis and dominance analysis to test the hypotheses proposed.FindingsThe results confirm that behavioral competencies (including leadership, communication, result orientation, emotional intelligence, ethics, creativity and motivation) are significantly and positively related to IS project success. Furthermore, the findings show that emotional intelligence (resilience, stress management and self-control), creativity (resourcefulness, creativity thinking and imagination) and ethics (transparency, honesty and integrity) are the most influential behavioral competencies for IS project success.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to use a quantitative analysis to empirically investigate project manager's behavioral competencies for project success in the IS discipline. It brings much-needed empirical evidence for the most important competencies for IS project managers.