Who Gets to Lead Together? Considering the Uneven Terrains in Shared and Collective Leadership

Organizational Inequality Regimes and Shared Leadership

Shared and collective leadership scholarship often assumes that distributing influence across team members expands inclusion and voice. Organizational inequality research, however, suggests that influence processes unfold within patterned regimes of advantage/disadvantage that are difficult to neutralize through emergent or procedural flattening alone. Acker's (2006, p. 443) concept of organizational “inequality regimes” is instructive here, defined as the “loosely interrelated practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within particular organizations.” Even organizations explicitly committed to egalitarianism tend to develop such regimes over time, including through informal alongside formal hierarchies (Diefenbach & Sillince, 2011; Friedrich & Steyaert, 2025). Read through shared leadership, horizontal role architectures, or emergent social influence processes do not suspend power; they redistribute leadership within already stratified relational fields where resources, status, and credibility are unevenly distributed before interaction begins and while it unfolds. The uneven participation in the opening vignette can thus be read less as a failure of facilitation and more as the activation of pre-existing inequality regimes within an ostensibly collaborative space.

Extending this insight, scholars have shown that inequality is reproduced through organizational practices such as hiring, role allocation, promotion, and compensation (Amis et al., 2020; Bapuji et al., 2020). Hiring processes often convert background advantages into perceived merit. Rivera (2012) demonstrates that elite professional service firms rely on “cultural matching,” privileging candidates whose biographies resonate with evaluators, while Rivera and Tilcsik (2016) find that higher-class candidates are more readily seen as organizational “fits.” In shared leadership contexts, emergent influence is therefore rarely neutral: who is perceived as a credible co-leader is frequently pre-patterned through selection processes that embed classed and gendered signals into judgments of leadership potential.

Inequality reproduction also operates through evaluation and reward infrastructures. For instance, Castilla (2008, p. 1479) shows that formally merit-based pay systems can yield “performance-reward bias,” whereby women and minorities receive lower compensation than white men with equal performance evaluation scores, while Amis et al. (2020) note that institutionalized myths of fairness can allow unequal outcomes to persist. In shared leadership arrangements, distributed decision rights may coexist with informal recognition systems that differentially reward visibility, confidence, or availability, creating asymmetric career risks and benefits. Finally, the micro-politics of task allocation can produce durable inequalities. Chan and Anteby (2016) relatedly show that within-job task segregation persists even when formal roles appear equivalent, investigating security work at airports, where women were assigned tasks requiring greater physical exertion, emotional strain, and relational tensions. Translated to shared leadership, this may, for example, entail some already recognized actors disproportionately performing high-visibility strategic work while others absorb undervalued relational or administrative labor, hardening shared leadership into participatory stratification. These dynamics are interactionally reproduced and normatively legitimized. For example, Baron and Pfeffer (1994) mobilizing a social psychology of inequality perspective, note that organizational members evaluate themselves relationally, shaping who feels entitled to claim leadership and whose claims are granted, while Kang et al. (2016) show how minority applicants sometimes “Whiten” résumés in anticipation of bias. Without explicit attention to these organizational dynamics, post-heroic leadership remains vulnerable to becoming egalitarian in form but stratified in effect.

Societal Resource Asymmetries and Participation Capacity

Beyond organizational processes, shared leadership unfolds within broader societal distributions of resources that shape who can participate, persist, and lead. Inequality research documents increasingly concentrated wealth and opportunity, noting that “contemporary global inequalities are close to the early twentieth century levels, at the peak of western imperialism” (Beckert, 2024; Chancel et al., 2022, p. 5) and are inextricably linked to political inequalities (Sadeh & Mair, 2024). These macro dynamics materialize inside collaborative settings as uneven access to time, financial slack, material and digital infrastructure, mobility, and educational capital. Shared leadership rarely begins on level ground; it is enacted on structurally tilted participation fields.

Related scholarship underscores that these asymmetries are reproduced by the institutions that structure economic life (Bapuji et al., 2020). Amis et al. (2018, p. 1131) argue that organizations and institutions are “heavily implicated in the rising levels of global inequality,” highlighting their mutually constitutive relationship. Participatory leadership designs introduced into organizations, therefore, cannot be analytically separated from the macro-political economy in which actors are differentially resourced and policy frames that foster certain types of enterprises and their (non)redistributive logics (Adler, 2016; Aguilera et al., 2022). Amis et al. (2020) emphasize that organizations demarcate access to employment and advancement opportunities, thereby structuring individuals’ socioeconomic standing. Actors do not enter shared leadership spaces as equivalent resource holders: students dependent on supervisors, precariously employed professionals, or participants from under-resourced regions may rationally self-censor or defer. Tokenism research suggests that structurally vulnerable actors often reduce engagement when opportunities appear constrained (Kanter, 1977) and are attributed lower competence and being less endorsed by leadership (Hekman et al., 2017). Additionally, individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds engage in “class work” to manage stigma in high-status interactions (Gray & Kish-Gephart, 2013).

Contemporary shifts in capitalism can further intensify these dynamics as outsourcing, platformization, and gig work generate bifurcated organizational structures that disproportionately disadvantage less well-economically-resourced workers, reshaping temporal security and psychological safety that are critical for visible leadership participation (Amis et al., 2018; Caza et al., 2022). As Leana et al. (2012) show, the working poor often face tightly constrained opportunities and limited slack resources, making sustained engagement in collaborative governance costly. The bandwidth instability and intermittent participation seen in the vignette are thus surface manifestations of deeper political-economic ordering. Without analytic attention to societal resource asymmetries, shared leadership risks systematically privileging those already best positioned to lead.

Cultural Marginalization and Legitimacy Filters

Even when material resources and formal participation opportunities are partly equalized, shared leadership can still unfold on a culturally uneven terrain. Sasaki and Baba (2024) define cultural marginalization as the exclusion of actors based on values, beliefs, and practices that diverge from dominant cultural norms. This foregrounds the fact that marginalization is not only about who is resourced to speak, but also about which cultural repertoires are recognized as legitimate ways of speaking, reasoning, and leading. From a “culture-as-toolkit” perspective, culture comprises the “stories, frames, categories, rituals, and practices” actors mobilize in a given geography (Giorgi et al., 2015, p. 2; Swidler, 1986). Yet, Sasaki and Baba (2024) show that unequal social positions shape both access to and credibility of these “cultural tools,” blending the toolkit view with power-sensitive cultural theory (e.g., Bourdieu, 1977; Ortner, 2006; Swartz, 2012). Shared leadership may thus be procedurally distributed while cultural legitimacy remains concentrated.

Crucially, cultural marginalization is mediated by organizations. Sasaki and Baba (2024) emphasize that organizations across domains such as education, media, and firms have historically fostered and sustained cultural marginalization. Shared leadership initiatives, therefore, also operate amid institutionalized assumptions about professionalism, rationality, and appropriate participation, shaping which proposals are deemed readable, which emotional expressions are deemed constructive, and which identities are deemed leader-like. Their framework (Sasaki & Baba, 2024, p. 6) conceptualizes cultural marginalization as a continuum from “cultural extermination” to “cultural distancing.” While extreme forms involve coercive assimilation (Martí & Fernández, 2013), more common in organizational life are subtle dynamics of cultural distancing in which dominant norms are reproduced unconsciously (Bapuji et al., 2024). Teams may distribute influence while still privileging particular conversational tempos, linguistic styles, or identity performances; leadership becomes shared unevenly because cultural fit silently structures recognition.

Cultural marginalization often manifests as identity and legitimacy work rather than simple silence. Sasaki and Baba (2024) note that marginalized groups typically possess fewer socio-cultural resources and face stronger structural constraints when mobilizing cultural repertoires. Consistent with this, Creed et al. (2010) show how stigmatized actors engage in identity work to remain institutionally legible, while Leung et al. (2014) demonstrate how “low-power, role-constrained actors” must carefully navigate dominant expectations to effect change. In shared and collective leadership contexts, some participants must translate themselves into dominant cultural codes to be recognized as competent co-leaders, while others remain inapt or unwilling to bend their cultural identity. Conceptualizing cultural marginalization as a process further underscores how shared leadership can support some degree of cultural survival or contribute to cultural loss (Emirbayer, 1997; Sasaki & Baba, 2024). In the opening vignette, Western conversational norms, Anglophone fluency, and implicit professionalism scripts do not merely shape airtime; they regulate the coalition's common sense about what responsible participation looks like. Shared leadership thus risks becoming a cultural filter disguised as inclusion unless research and practice attend not only to the distribution of influence but also to the cultural grammars that make some forms of leading recognizable in the first place.

Grounding Shared Leadership in Interlacing Uneven Terrains

Taken together, these asymmetries and frictions arise not from any single breakdown but from the entanglement of organizational, societal, and cultural inequalities. Organizational inequality regimes shape who enters collaborative spaces and how influence is informally allocated (Acker, 2006; Amis et al., 2020), societal resource asymmetries condition who can sustain participation and assume visible roles (Amis et al., 2018; Bapuji et al., 2020; Beckert, 2024) and cultural marginalization filters which repertoires of speaking, reasoning, and leading are recognized as legitimate (Creed et al., 2010; Sasaki & Baba, 2024). Read this way, the uneven dynamics in the opening vignette are not merely facilitation failures but expressions of a structurally tilted relational field in which formal equality coexists with stratified capacities to claim and be granted leadership. The implication for shared and collective leadership scholarship is consequential: horizontal design features, or emergent processes, while valuable, remain insufficient unless research and practice explicitly address the multilevel conditions that differentially enable actors to participate, persist, and be recognized. Shared leadership must therefore be theorized less as a neutral group-level influence pattern and more as a socially embedded accomplishment, continuously shaped by the uneven political-economic and cultural terrains in which it is enacted.

Introducing Spivak's Concept of the “Subaltern”

While pluralist and post-heroic leadership models emphasize permeability and distributed agency, they often retain the assumption that actors enter collaborative spaces with roughly comparable capacities to speak and be recognized. Postcolonial and feminist scholarship has long challenged this premise, demonstrating that participation is structured by historically sedimented relations of power that shape whose knowledge travels and whose remains peripheral (Brah & Phoenix, 2004; Spivak, 1999). From this perspective, the problem is not merely unequal inclusion but unequal conditions of intelligibility—it is not only about who can speak, but also who can be heard, understood, and consequential.

It is precisely this deeper asymmetry that Spivak's (1988, 1999) notion of subalternity brings into view. Extending Gramsci, Spivak conceptualizes the subaltern not simply as the marginalized but as those structurally excluded from the institutional circuits that would render their speech consequential. Subalternity, thereby, offers a critical lens for examining the politics of voice, representation, and epistemic power. In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak (1988) argues that the subaltern, namely those structurally positioned outside hegemonic systems of political, economic, and discursive power, cannot simply be “given voice” within dominant frameworks, because those very frameworks shape, translate, and often appropriate what can be heard or recognized as intelligible speech. Subalternity thus does not merely denote marginalization; it refers to a condition of structural silencing produced through colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist epistemologies. By foregrounding the limits of representation and the risks of speaking for others, Spivak challenges scholars to interrogate how knowledge production itself may reproduce exclusion, even within projects that claim emancipatory intent. It is important to note that subalternity is not synonymous with minority status. A minority refers to a numerically smaller or socially marginalized group within an existing political and representational framework; such groups may still possess institutional channels through which their interests can be articulated and recognized. The subaltern, by contrast, occupies a position of structural exclusion from hegemonic systems of representation altogether. Subalternity names not simply disadvantage, but a condition in which one's speech cannot be fully heard, translated, or legitimized within dominant epistemic and political orders. Thus, while minorities may struggle for recognition within the system, the subaltern marks the limit of representation itself. Her question, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), is therefore not about literal muteness but about a failure of uptake within dominant epistemic regimes. Subalternity marks subjects removed from lines of social mobility and from the legitimacy structures that authorize knowledge claims. Crucially, attempts to “give voice” may themselves reinscribe colonial power when they rely on representational categories already shaped by hegemonic epistemologies, as “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (Spivak, 1988, p. 104). Subalternity thus redirects analysis from access to participation toward the politics of representation and audibility.

Revisiting the opening vignette clarifies what is at stake. The uneven meeting dynamics you observed cannot be reduced solely to organizational inequality (e.g., hiring practices, social hierarchies, and dependency relations), societal resource asymmetries (e.g., income, bandwidth, or funding gaps), or cultural marginalization (e.g., identity norms). While these conditions structure participation, subalternity points to a further threshold: whether articulated contributions can count as meaningful leadership knowledge at all. Reading against the optimistic work of shared leadership allows us to expose concealed epistemic violence, reveal how dominant discourses silence subaltern voices, and demonstrate how apparently emancipatory narratives and concepts risk reproducing power. Hence, when participants speak, but their interventions fail to register as authoritative, relevant, “on point,” or understandable at all, the issue is no longer only unequal access but unequal uptake. The politics of representation concerns who is positioned to speak for whom; audibility concerns whose contributions are actually heard and responded to; intelligibility concerns which forms of expression are recognized as legitimate leadership input. Shared leadership architectures may successfully open the floor yet still reproduce subaltern positioning when these deeper epistemic filters remain intact.

One might therefore assume that shared leadership's emphasis on listening procedures, dialogical spaces, and pluralist inclusion would be sufficient to address these concerns. If leadership is distributed and multiple voices are invited into deliberation, does this not allow the subaltern to speak? It is precisely this liberal-pluralist optimism that Letiche (2010) forcefully unsettles. Engaging Spivak, Letiche (2010) argues that much organizational enthusiasm for “polyphony” reduces radical alterity to manageable diversity. In many accounts, polyphony becomes a technique for incorporating difference within a single episteme. Epistemes are regarded as the conditions that define what counts as valid knowledge and intelligible speech within a given social order. Multiple perspectives and polyphony, in Letiche's reading, often remain tethered to a specific episteme, rather than confronting the conditions that silence its marginalized participants may offer. He warns that the subaltern is often transformed into “an object of normal epistemic grasp,” thereby neutralizing its disruptive force (Letiche, 2010, p. 263). Moreover, those occupying the position of “the knower” are unlikely to relinquish epistemic authority voluntarily because it is intertwined with socio-economic power (p. 264). From this vantage point, pluralist dialogue may actually stabilize dominant knowledge regimes rather than unsettle them. Letiche therefore introduces the possibility of a “différend” between management discourse and subaltern positions, suggesting that communicative inclusion may not bridge deeply unequal life-worlds. For shared leadership research, this is a profound challenge: the multiplication of voices does not necessarily produce epistemic equality, and carefully designed listening architectures may still operate within what he calls a single regime of sense-making. What appears as horizontal participation may thus remain bounded by the very epistemic infrastructures that constitute subalternity in the first place.

Recent intersectional postcolonial work further sharpens the analysis of subalternity. Raman's (2020) study of Dalit women demonstrates that subalternity is internally differentiated and cannot be treated as a homogeneous condition. By foregrounding the intersection of caste, gender, and postcolonial hierarchy, Raman shows how even within emancipatory discourses, certain subjects remain structurally muted. Intersectionality here does more than add complexity; it reveals how systems of domination co-constitute the very possibility of voice, credibility, and recognition. For shared leadership, this insight is especially consequential. It suggests that formally inclusive or participatory arrangements may still reproduce patterned exclusions when they fail to account for how authority and legitimacy are intersectionally organized. In other words, leadership may be procedurally shared while remaining selectively inhabitable across differently positioned actors.

A growing body of organizational studies echoes these concerns in adjacent ways. Research on grassroots legitimacy work shows how marginalized actors must carefully balance conformity and resistance in their communication to gain recognition (Chowdhury, 2021; Pal, 2016), while emerging discussions of subaltern leadership highlight leadership practices rooted in everyday survival and community organizing (Carranza et al., 2023). Yet Spivak's more radical warning remains difficult to absorb: research itself is implicated in the production of the subaltern when it assumes transparent representation (Abdallah, 2024; Manning, 2021; Mignolo, 2009). For studies of shared and collective leadership, the implication is clear. Without interrogating the epistemic, cultural, and political conditions that structure audibility and recognition, the move from heroic to shared leadership risks remaining unable to recognize and hear what is supposed to be the basis of sharing. Spivak offers the concept of “strategic essentialism,” which refers to the temporary and self-conscious adoption of a simplified collective identity for political or strategic purposes. While Spivak is critical of essentialist notions of fixed or homogeneous identities, she acknowledged that marginalized groups may, at times, mobilize a unified identity to make claims within dominant political structures. Crucially, such essentialism is meant to be provisional and reflexive, not a theoretical endorsement of stable or naturalized group identities. In the following section, we explore the theoretical and practical implications of our text.

Future Research: Shared and Collective Leadership on Uneven Terrains

This commentary is intended as a conceptual bridge. It offers a theoretical repertoire for bringing organizational inequality research together with feminist, intersectional, and decolonial thought in order to rethink shared and collective leadership as a socially embedded accomplishment rather than a neutral influence pattern. Concretely, we see at least five generative directions.

First, shared leadership scholarship can move from treating inequality as a contextual “antecedent” or “moderator” to theorizing it as constitutive. Organizational inequality regimes (Acker, 2006) are not background noise but part of the very relational field in which leadership is claimed, granted, and recognized. Future research could therefore examine how shared leadership configurations stabilize or disrupt inequality regimes through mundane practices such as task allocation, recognition routines, performance evaluation, and informal sponsorship.

Second, scholars can more explicitly connect shared leadership to societal resource asymmetries that shape participation capacity. Research might investigate how time, financial slack, digital infrastructure, linguistic capital, and mobility, condition who can persist in shared leadership roles, who withdraws, who is seemingly heard, and who is positioned as “reliably present.” This expands shared leadership beyond team dynamics toward a political economy of participation.

Third, cultural marginalization invites research that treats shared leadership as operating amid dominant cultural norms, repertoires, and identities that exclude some and marginalize others. Studies could analyze which identity performances, adherences to specific norms, and hegemony-aligned behaviors are recognized as “leader-like” or “leader-worthy” in ostensibly horizontal collaborations, and how these recognition patterns reproduce stratification even under formally egalitarian designs (Friedrich & Steyaert, 2025). It may align with and extend Ferry's (2025) theorization of men's critical and feminist leadership development in “reflexive identity development,” “intersectional relationality,” and “organizational accountability.”

Fourth, decolonial feminist resources sharpen the analysis of voice beyond inclusion. Bringing Spivak's notion of subalternity into leadership studies suggests that the key issue is not simply whether marginalized actors can speak, but whether their contributions become audible, intelligible, and consequential within dominant epistemic regimes (Carranza et al., 2023). Future research could operationalize audibility and intelligibility as interactional outcomes, tracing how ideas are taken up, translated, attributed, ignored, or ventriloquized across intersectional positions.

Fifth, methodological innovation is needed. Capturing “uneven terrains” requires designs that can follow micro-level interactional uptake, silence, and recognition over time, across channels and infrastructures that quantitative designs cannot easily capture. Ethnographic immersions, as well as detailed meeting transcripts, chat logs, and digital communication data, may provide first insight. On the meso and macro-level, methodologically tending to the “societal turn” (Bapuji et al., 2020) in leadership studies, furthermore requires substantial methodological re-orientations in which “antecedents” go far beyond, i.e., “team factors” or “organizational support systems” (Wassenaar et al., 2025, p. 21; Zhu et al., 2018) and seek to understand the collective leadership as always grounded in multilevel inequality and power difference. Finally, these directions position shared and collective leadership research to become interdisciplinary and integrate more sociologically (Amis et al., 2020; Bapuji et al., 2020; Gray & Kish-Gephart, 2013) and politically literate (Sadeh & Mair, 2024) without abandoning its emancipatory aspiration. The payoff is not only critique but also conceptual tools for understanding when shared leadership expands collective agency, which may be conflictual and paradoxical (Ashcraft, 2001; Kark et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2018) and when it reroutes inequality through subtler pathways (Bapuji et al., 2024).

Practice Implications: Beyond Procedural Sharing Toward Situated Equity

For members engaged in shared and collective leadership and for those designing participatory organizational architectures, the central recommendation is to treat leadership sharing neither as a horizontalizing structural switch nor as a rather smooth emergence of social influence, but as a process that is shaped by ongoing socio-political struggles that cross analytical levels. Horizontal role distribution, rotating facilitation, and inclusive procedures are necessary, but insufficient. The more difficult task is to persistently diagnose, reflect, and actively reshape the unequal conditions under which people can participate, persist, and be recognized as legitimate contributors.

The opening vignette illustrates what happens when egalitarian design outpaces contextual diagnosis. Despite careful procedural intentions, participation quickly stratified. The lesson is not that shared leadership is bound to fail, but that it is implicated in uneven organizational, societal, cultural, and epistemic terrains already patterned by inequality. The following scaffolding translates these insights into practice.

At the organizational level, shared leadership initiatives should be paired with scrutiny of inequality regimes embedded in hiring, compensation, promotion, and role allocation. When some participants speak cautiously or defer repeatedly, this often reflects dependency relations and credibility hierarchies produced long before the meeting begins. Organizational developers can therefore complement shared leadership structures with upstream interventions: transparent criteria for advancement, recognition of relational and coordination labor as leadership work, and periodic influence audits that trace whose contributions shape decisions and whose do not. Without alignment between participatory aspirations and organizational reward systems, distributed leadership risks recentralizing informally around already advantaged actors.

Responding to societal level inequities, practitioners should assume that participants enter collaborative spaces with uneven access to time, income, digital infrastructure, mobility, network capital, and the like. The vignette's bandwidth disruptions and intermittent participation are not merely technical annoyances but surface expressions of broader resource asymmetries. Designers of shared leadership processes can partially compensate by resourcing participation itself: investing in connectivity and translation support, creating asynchronous channels for influence, rotating meeting times across time zones, and legitimizing flexible presence without penalizing status and remunerating adequately. Shared leadership becomes more credible when participation capacity is provisioned rather than presumed.

At the cultural level, the work shifts to pluralizing what counts as competent, recognized, and endorsed participation. Shared leadership often unfolds within dominant repertoires of professionalism, pacing, and expression that silently privilege certain habitus and identities and marginalize others along gender, race, class, heritage, religion, and others. Even when airtime is formally equal, influence may remain culturally filtered. Facilitators and leaders can intervene by varying communicative formats (spoken, written, visual, asynchronous), explicitly naming when interaction norms reflect particular cultural expectations, and tracking whose ideas are taken up, amplified, or bypassed, and most centrally create intentional moments of reflection, learning about others’ identities, histories and legacies of privilege or marginalization—that should entail also spaces to learn and reflect that does not put the burden of literacy on the marginalized group (i.e., male ally, white reflection, inter-cultural learning spaces).

At the decolonial level. In many shared leadership settings, marginalized actors do speak, yet their contributions fail to travel or to reshape the collective sense-making. Here, the practical injunction is profoundly demanding—listen, listen, and listen to how one listens—and most likely insufficient. Not only for presence, but for uptake. Drawing on Letiche's warning, however, practitioners should remain cautious about assuming that better listening architectures will fully resolve epistemic asymmetries. The task is therefore not to perfect inclusion but to institutionalize ongoing attentiveness to its likely failures. This also pertains to strategically mobilizing influence of marginalized groups by collective identification as “women leaders,” “Indigenous leaders,” or “Global South leadership.” While strategic essentialism can enable political traction and organizational change, it also risks reifying identities and reproducing the very categories through which marginalization operates and must therefore stay under scrutiny. Thus, it invites a careful balance between pragmatic coalition-building and critical vigilance toward the essentializing tendencies embedded in leadership discourse.

Across these layers, the broader lesson extends beyond the vignette. Shared and collective leadership do not unfold on neutral ground. They are enacted within stratified organizational systems, unequal political economies, culturally patterned interaction orders, and historically sedimented knowledge hierarchies. For practitioners, the work of sharing leadership is inseparable from the work of continuously leveling the terrains on which participation becomes possible. Thereby, it is important to regard inequality-sensitive leadership endeavors, whether in research or practice, as ongoing—it is a continuous, faltering trial to level uneven terrains. Shared and collective forms of leadership should therefore embrace their egalitarian ideals, while recognizing that they may never fully realize them. Researchers and practitioners are thus invited into a dissonant, at times paradoxical, and unfinalizable involvement in post-heroic leadership.