Does sharing leadership improve team performance in Vevey?
A team’s formal manager is not always the person who guides its work on every problem. The managerial question is specific: does allowing several members to influence how work is directed improve performance, and under what conditions?
What the literature establishes
Jay B. Carson, Paul E. Tesluk and Jennifer A. Marrone (2007, Academy of Management Journal) studied shared leadership in consulting teams. They found a positive relationship between its presence and client-rated performance. Here, the concept refers to influence exercised among several members, rather than simply to a manager delegating tasks.
An association extending beyond a single study
Elisa D’Innocenzo, John E. Mathieu and Michael R. Kukenberger (2016, Journal of Management) also found a positive association between shared leadership and team performance in a meta-analysis. Their analysis shows that how shared leadership is defined and measured matters to the results. Measuring the influence members exercise on one another is therefore not interchangeable with an overall assessment of the team’s leadership.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that teams benefit from dispensing with a manager or systematically rotating responsibility for directing work. These findings establish neither proposition: shared leadership can coexist with formal authority. The issue is instead whether someone with relevant expertise can guide a particular phase of work without making accountability for the decision ambiguous. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not settle
A positive association does not establish that distributing influence more widely will, by itself, improve performance. An already effective team may also give its members more opportunities to take the initiative. Neither the study of consulting teams nor the meta-analysis is an intervention trial in Riviera businesses; applying their findings requires a local check.
A practical check in Vevey
In Vevey’s setting of global food businesses, group headquarters and Riviera SMEs, an exercise within SHR’s « Performance d’équipe » programme could focus on a specific interface, such as quality, production and sales. Across two comparable periods, before and during the trial, record for each cross-functional decision who leads the analysis, who makes the decision and the time between a complete case being opened and the decision; during the trial, explicitly assign leadership of the analysis to the person with the relevant expertise. Then compare the median time and the proportion of decisions reopened because necessary expertise had been omitted, keeping the types of cases comparable. This record will not prove causality, but it will help establish whether shared influence accompanies more effective coordination rather than less clear accountability. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Vevey in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Vevey
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