Shared leadership and team creativity: Examining effects of shared leadership level and concentration and the countervailing mechanisms.

Integrating insights from team hierarchy literature and shared leadership research, we propose and test a model that illuminates the positive and negative team processes through which shared leadership relates to team creativity. We use a social network lens to examine both shared leadership level (indexed by team density of informal leadership ties) and shared leadership concentration (indexed by team centralization of such ties). With a sample of 136 work teams and three waves of surveys, we found that shared leadership concentration weakens the positive effect of shared leadership level on team creativity. We explicated the positive and negative mediating roles played by team information elaboration and team status conflict, respectively. Our findings show that shared leadership concentration serves as an enabler or inhibitor on which mediating mechanism is at play, such that when shared leadership concentration is higher, there is a negative indirect effect of shared leadership level on team creativity via team status conflict. By contrast, when shared leadership concentration is lower, shared leadership level has a positive indirect effect on team creativity via team information elaboration. Our work provides nuanced insights into how to maximize the potential benefits of shared leadership in enhancing team creativity.