The effects of shared leadership and collective efficacy on team performance and learning: The mediating role of team action processes

Shared leadership should have many benefits for teams. This study addresses the call to better understand its effects by extending research suggesting that collective efficacy mediates the effects of shared leadership on team performance. Specifically, we explore the extent to which team action processes explain how and why the collective efficacy that emerges as a result of shared leadership impacts team outcomes. We also add team learning outcomes to the team effectiveness outcomes that are ultimately affected by shared leadership because the failure to systematically explore learning outcomes ignores the reality that today’s work teams are often asked to share leadership to better move from task to task, span unfamiliar boundaries, and continuously learn. Using a sample of 85 teams that worked on a decision-making task in a laboratory setting, we found that teams performed better and learned faster to the extent that they shared leadership. Specifically, shared leadership increased teams’ collective efficacy beliefs, which, in turn, increased teams’ engagement in action processes and resulted in higher performance and less time required to learn. Supplemental tests demonstrated that the effects we found could not be explained by other teamwork processes (i.e., transition and interpersonal processes). We conclude by discussing the need to broaden the search for the consequences of shared leadership, the implications of our findings for theorizing and testing midlevel perspectives on teamwork processes, and by offering additional recommendations for future work on team learning.