Shared Leadership, Team Effectiveness Аnd Innovation: Role of Empowering Leadership and Team Leader Trustworthiness At The United States International University (USIU) – Africa

Abstract

Shared leadership has recently taken center-stage in the leadership literature with numerous studies reporting its positive impact on team and organizational outcomes. While acknowledging the contributions of previous research, a blanket adoption of shared leadership in the Kenyan context may be counterintuitive. In fact, an extensive literature search revealed most studies on shared leadership were undertaken in the US, China, Turkey, Germany, and Japan; countries that might not share much with Kenya in many respects. The purported potential of shared leadership, and the paucity of research on the same in the Kenyan context necessitated the need to explore the effects of shared leadership on team effectiveness and team innovative behavior in the Nairobi-based United States International University (USIU) – Africa. A survey research design was adopted to test the respondents’ perceptions because the required data was not available from any other source and primary data had to be collected. A survey approach was used as an inexpensive method of collecting data from a sample and generalizing the results to the constituent population. With the permission of the university authorities, a simple random sampling was utilized to identify the study participants among full-time non-faculty staff members of the university. A total of 204 respondents participated in the study by filling out a sixty-eight-item supervised, self-administered questionnaires between March and April 2018. SPSS was used to clean the data and generate descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling was undertaken using Mplus 6 to analyze the latent variables in the theory-specified model. The study found that team leader trustworthiness and empowering leadership stimulate the emergence of shared leadership (β = .344, p  .01; β = .456, p  .01, respectively) and shared leadership is positively and significantly related to perceptions of team effectiveness (β = .83, p  .01) but negatively and significantly related to team innovative behavior (β = -.25, p  .01). The study also found that shared leadership mediates the relationship between team leader trustworthiness and team effectiveness (β = .285, p  .01); team leader trustworthiness and team innovative behavior (β = -.086, p  .05); empowering leadership behavior and team effectiveness (β = .378, p  .01); and empowering leadership behavior and team innovative behavior (β = -.114, p  .01). The results confirm the theory-specified model of the antecedents and outcomes of shared leadership and point to the importance of understanding the dynamics of these constructs. An important contribution of this study is linking team leader’s trust worthiness to the emergence of shared leadership as this particular relationship has not been tested in previous studies. The results of this study have some practical implications for practitioners and point to areas of further study for researchers. Shared leadership grows in a supportive environment where appointed leaders are willing to share influence, power, and control with their peers. This requires a heightened awareness of the benefits and pitfalls of shared leadership so that managers can harness its positive outcomes and limit potentially negative outcomes. For managers, learning to properly plan, communicate, and delegate work is essential. Equally important is coaching skills to make team members more self-reliant. Managers would also benefit from dealing with team members in a respectful manner and showing concern for employee welfare. For team members, understanding team dynamics and making useful contributions while retaining individual visibility is necessary. Finally, organizations should create a conducive environment that allows employees to feel safe and foster trust amongst themselves. The study is not without limitations and future researchers should focus on replicating the research in other institutions, among teams that have different task complexities and interdependencies, and across industries and sectors. Secondly, future researchers may benefit from using longitudinal data as opposed to the cross-sectional data that was used in this study. This will help capture changes in perceptions of transient constructs like innovation which spring up when there are opportunities. Similarly, future research should use multiple raters to measure the model variables and employ multiple analysis approaches such as social network analysis and direct consensus models to measure team-level responses. Finally, and especially, researchers should test the factors that mediate the relationship between shared leadership and team innovative behavior.