Cultural and societal influences on shared leadership in globally dispersed teams

Leading globally dispersed teams poses critical challenges, especially if the team members are not only physically separated, but also culturally diverse and their tasks are dynamic and complex. It has been argued that shared leadership behaviors, such as continuous reflection, anticipation of a team's information needs, and initiating a team's social influence, positively influence virtual team performance. Country-level effects on shared leadership in globally dispersed teams, however, have been neglected. Building on the country institutional profile developed by Kostova (1997), we argue that regulative, cognitive, and normative components influence the likelihood that the individual will engage in shared leadership behaviors. Analyzing the differences between the institutional profiles of team members' home countries as reflected in institutional diversity as a team-level property, we furthermore point to different levels of institutional diversity as an enabling or hindering condition of shared leadership. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.