House and Aditya (1997) commented that "there is some speculation, and some preliminary evidence, to suggest that concentration of leadership in a single chain of command way be less optimal than shared leadership responsibility among two or more individuals in certain task environments. ■ ■ ■ [Leadership involves collaborative relationships that tead to collective action grounded in shared values of people *ho work together to effect positive change" (p. 457). They referred to collective leadership in their review of the leadership literature, borrowing the term peer leadership from ^ork published by Bowers and Seashore (1966), stating, is also possible that some of the specific leader behav-rs required to enact generic functions can be distributed
Integrating Several Streams of Leadership Research 289
throughout the entire work group or work unit being managed. Thus, several individuals would enact the same specific leaders' behaviors contemporaneously"' (p. 458). As House and Aditya noted, "The research by Bowers and Seashore (1966) clearly demonstrates that the exercise of leaders' behaviors can be shared by members of work units, as well as conducted by formal work unit managers" (p. 459).
Several authors have described leadership as being a collective social influence process (Bales, 1954; Bowers & Seashore, 1966; House & Aditya, 1997) or as coleadership (Pearce & Sims, 2000). For example, while summarizing the Harvard Laboratory Studies on leadership, Bales (1954) suggested that the term coleadership might be beneficial for groups to allocate the task and relational leadership roles to different individuals. Research on self-managing teams (Manz & Sims, 1987, 1993) has helped to move the leadership field toward recognizing the importance of leadership by the team versus leadership of the team by a single individual (Sivasubramaniam et al, 2002). However, most prior research on leadership in teams at all organizational levels has assessed the leadership of a single individual leading a team (Cohen, Chang, & Ledford, 1997). Although several authors have introduced the concept of distributed or collective leadership within teams (Katzenbach, 1997; Kozlowski, Gully, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 1996; Manz & Sims, 1993; Pearce & Sims, 2000), there have been few attempts to examine leadership as a group-level construct, Dunphy and Bryant (1996) concluded that future research must include leadership by the team and of 'the team when modeling effectiveness.
Yukl (1998) stated, "The extent to which leadership can be shared...[,] the success of shared leadership^] and the implications for the design of organizations are important and interesting questions that deserve more research. As yet, we have only begun to examine these research questions" (p. 504). For instance, Pearce and Sims (2000) examined the contribution of vertical and shared leadership to the rated effectiveness in change management teams, concluding that shared leadership independently contributed to predicting team effectiveness above and beyond vertical leadership.
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Burns (1997) extended his work on individual transformational leadership to include a focus on collective leadership. He argued for "the existence of webs of potential collective leadership" (p. 1). He then suggested that "the initiator [i.e., leader] may continue as a single dominating 'leader' a la Castro, but more typically she will merge with others in a series of participant interactions that will constitute collective leadership.... I see crucial leadership acts in the collective process" (pp. 2-3). Similar to Burns's extensions to transformational leadership, Bass (1998) noted that "transformational leadership could be shared among the team
290 Leadership Models, Methods, and Applications
members__ Instead of motivation being supplied by identi
fication of members with an idealized, charismatic leader,
similar motivation would be supplied by identification with
the team.... Inspiration would come from a sharing of mu
tually articulated goals" (p. 157).
Sivasubramaniam et al. (2000) reported that perceptions of collective transformational leadership in student teams predicted team potency and group performance over a three-month period of time. Pearce (1997) reported that shared leadership was related to group potency, citizenship, and group effectiveness. Mankin, Cohen, and Bikson (1996) argued that the role of leadership will change in technology-mediated groups and that leadership may emerge more as a shared construct initiated within a team. Preliminary evidence to support their position comes from Weisband, Schneider, and Connolly (1995). Group members interacting through computer-mediated systems instead of face to face participated more equally.
In sum, by advancing leadership as a shared process, we can position researchers to explore from a cognitive, behavioral, and contextual perspective an alternative and more complex form of leadership relevant to today's web-based, virtual organizations.
