Task interdependence and shared leadership: A structural perspective on the distribution of leadership in teams

Shared leadership has consistently been shown to predict team effectiveness. However, research also indicates that different teams may require different configurations of shared leadership, and achieving maximum sharedness in leadership does not always guarantee superior team outcomes. This reality underscores the need for a normative theory of shared leadership that can extend our understanding of the construct and facilitate its adoption in organizations. Despite the significance of such a theory, little attention has been given to its development and our understanding of how shared leadership should be distributed across different teams remains quite limited. In this article, we adopt a structural perspective to propose that the task interdependence network can serve as a robust foundation for devising effective shared leadership strategies. Our conceptual framework outlines the nuanced implications of the task interdependence network-from determining the optimal level of shared leadership necessary for performance to identifying potential members for shared leadership responsibilities. In doing so, we emphasize that the specific implications of the task interdependence network may vary, rather than remain uniform, across different dimensions of shared leadership.