Effects of shared leadership on team creativity through knowledge-sharing in an e-learning environment

Abstract

Main focus of this paper is placed on team creativity. In order for an organization to remain competitive, team creativity level should be controlled to stay higher than an average level that rival companies are believed to show. Beyond managers' control, we emphasize a voluntarily and informally emergent structure and introduce a social network perspective within team creativity. Since a team is composed of individual members, and a certain kind of leadership and trust exist in the team to affect team creativity, it is necessary to investigate relationships between leadership, trust and team creativity in a rigorous way. In this sense, we propose a team creativity model in which shared leadership, interpersonal trust (affect-based trust and cognitionbased trust), and knowledge-sharing are included and their subsequent influence on team creativity is analyzed. For the sake of empirical analysis, an e-learning course was administered in a private university, and 40 teams were organized for this study. 249 valid questionnaires were garnered, and analyzed by structural equation model. Results show that shared leadership, knowledge sharing and cognition-based trust significantly influence team creativity.

A multi-level analysis of the impact of shared leadership in diverse virtual teams

“…First, this study sheds light on the impact of shared leadership in virtual teams. Although shared leadership has been shown to increase knowledge sharing, trust, constructive interactions, team cohesion and team creativity [5,26] it has not been shown to increase objective virtual team performance [5,13]. This study contributes to this literature by confirming that shared leadership has positive impacts on another construct measuring the quality of team interactions, satisfaction.…”

“…February 23-27, 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA There are relatively few empirical studies that have directly examined the impact of shared leadership in virtual teams. These studies have found that shared leadership increases team cohesion and positive communication behaviors like cooperation, exchange of information, respect for others, and trust [5,13,26]. However, neither [5] nor [13] found a direct link between shared leadership and team performance.…”

“…Unfortunately, there was no statistical connection between shared leadership and team performance [25]. Lee et al [26] did however find a positive link between shared leadership and the selfreported creativity of virtual teams. A related study by Zhu et al [58] found that shared leadership influenced individual contributions to Wikipedia.…”

“…In fact, most of the studies that have found a strong positive relationship between shared leadership and team performance have used perceptual measures by team members as surrogates of team performance [12]. For example, Lee et al [26] found a positive link between shared leadership and team creativity, but creativity was a self-reported outcome. There seems to be very little evidence that suggests that shared leadership increases a team level objective performance variable.…”

A Multilevel Analysis of the Relationship between Shared Leadership and Creativity in Inter‐Organizational Teams

“…The existing literature proposed that in the field of management, the study of diversity would be all about leadership (DiTomaso & Hooijberg, 1996), and the creativity research should pay strong attention to leadership (Shin & Zhou, 2007;Yoshida, Sendjaya, Hirst, & Cooper, 2014). This focus indicates that leadership should be significantly related to the creative outcomes of inter-organizational teams because of the diversity of team members (Lee, Lee, & Seo, 2011;Robert, 2013). Among the various types of leadership, shared leadership is particularly new and important as this leadership conforms to the trend of enhancing empowerment and autonomy within inter-organizational teams (Thorpe, Gold, & Lawler, 2011).…”