Examining employee willingness to execute shared leadership: The role of leadership behaviour, gender, age, and context

Abstract

Shared leadership refers to a post-heroic conceptualization of leadership dispersed among employees. Studies on shared leadership in teams show its emergence depends highly on team and formal team leader characteristics, but employees’ own voice is remarkably absent: we know little about how employees individually consider how they would want to execute shared leadership. Taking a bottom-up perspective, this study presents a large-scale conjoint experiment in which 6742 healthcare employees were asked to evaluate specific leadership behaviours. The results show a notable share of employees are willing to execute shared leadership, but willingness varies dependent on a number of factors. Employees are more willing to share leadership when it is focused on building relationships or bringing about change, when it takes only few hours and when it benefits others. Besides, willingness to execute shared leadership is higher among young or male employees, and in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. This study contributes to understanding how leadership behaviour, personal characteristics and context affect the emergence of shared leadership. The study concludes by critically exploring some of the possible systemic causes for differences in willingness to execute shared leadership, connecting these to broader issues in healthcare employment.