Shared leadership and project success: The roles of knowledge sharing, cohesion and trust in the team

The role of shared leadership behavior in a project context has received insufficient empirical and theoretical attention. This paper explores its influence on project success, specifically in an IT project context. The paper additionally investigates the mediating role of knowledge sharing, cohesion, and trust in team as moderators. We collected the data of 236 team members in IT projects on two-time points and analyzed the conditional process model through PROCESS after achieving model fit. Results revealed that shared leadership amplifies project success directly and via knowledge sharing and cohesion. Slope analysis revealed that trust in team has an interaction effect with cohesion and knowledge sharing which also affects project success. The study discussed the practical implications and drew conclusions from the results.