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1. Introduction
Increasing globalization and competition, along with the ubiquitous pursuit of innovation, drive organizations to organize more effectively, in order to maintain a competitive advantage in an ever-changing market (Drucker, 1995; Goodwin et al. , 2009). Concomitantly, organizations face the challenges of meeting the needs and seizing the advantages of a more educated workforce with a wider range of knowledge to offer (Pearce and Manz, 2005). As a result, the prevalence and use of teams has increased along with a focus on factors that enable team performance (Burke et al. , 2011; Morgeson et al. , 2010). Leadership is one crucial contributor to team performance (Zaccaro et al. , 2001); however, in order to leverage the advantages of teamwork and to capture emergent leadership dynamics in the team (Barry, 1991), it is necessary to question traditional leadership models that place the formal hierarchical leader as the primary center of attention (Gronn, 2002; Morgeson et al. , 2010).
Rather than focussing narrowly on downward influence and leadership by a single individual, attention has shifted toward the leadership processes that develop within the team and among the team members (Bligh et al. , 2006; Day et al. , 2004, 2006; Friedrich et al. , 2009; Pearce and Sims, 2000, 2002). Shared leadership represents a reconceptualization of leadership on a team level (Ensley et al. , 2006; Mehra et al. , 2006), and it describes influence and leadership as a collective and shared activity emerging among the members of a team (Conger and Pearce, 2003). In addition, a shared leadership approach implies that leadership responsibilities and tasks are actively distributed (Perry et al. , 1999), and influence processes are horizontal and mutual instead of vertical and unidirectional. In this way, the notion of shared leadership expands the traditional leadership model to include multiple leaders and to take advantage of dispersed knowledge and expertise among team members.
Within the last decade, shared leadership has received growing theoretical and empirical attention, and its significance in relation to team performance and team processes has been demonstrated across different contexts (e.g. Boies et al. , 2010; Carson et al. , 2007; Hoch et al. , 2010b; Pearce and Sims, 2002; Sivasubramaniam et al. , 2002; Small and Rentsch, 2010; Solansky,...