Xie, Wen-Xin; Fisher, Colin M; (2025) How shared leadership and task complexity shape expectations of team effectiveness. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 10.1080/1359432X.2025.2495968. (In press).

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Abstract

Research has shown that shared leadership enhances team effectiveness, but do external stakeholders also expect teams with shared leadership to be more effective? Study 1 (n = 368) showed that external stakeholders generally expect teams with shared leadership to be less effective than teams with a single leader. This effect was strengthened by stakeholders’ hierarchical beliefs about leadership, indicating that shared leadership does not match with stakeholders’ default beliefs about team leadership so that they would not expect these teams to be effective. However, Study 2 (n = 291) showed that external stakeholders expect teams with shared leadership to perform worse than teams with single leaders in simple tasks, but better than teams with single leaders in complex tasks. This reversal occurs because complex tasks evoke more communal beliefs about leadership. Shared leadership aligns with these communal beliefs, leading stakeholders to expect greater effectiveness in teams that share leadership. In conclusion, stakeholders expect teams to be more effective when the team’s leadership structure matches their beliefs about team leadership and their beliefs are contingent on task complexity. We replicated these results in 8 different studies (n = 2220).

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