Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies

Shared and collective leadership scholarship has compellingly challenged heroic models by locating leadership in relational, plural, and distributed influence processes, rotating roles, and participatory design. Yet, the egalitarian impetus of “leading together” often falters in practice. Building on a scenario of an intentionally inclusive, collaboratively led conference that nonetheless stratifies participation and influence, this paper argues that shared leadership research has insufficiently theorized the intersectional and multi-level inequalities through which horizontal influence is enacted: sharing unfolds on uneven terrains. We develop a conceptual sensitizing repertoire that links shared and collective leadership to organizational inequality regimes and their mundane reproduction, to societal resource asymmetries that shape participation capacity, to cultural marginalization that filters legitimacy and recognition. Specifically, we emphasize decolonial feminist theory by explaining “subalternity” as a conceptual resource. In doing so, we suggest a societal turn in leadership studies that examines how shared leadership practices interact with broader economic, cultural, and epistemic inequalities, and we outline implications for research, theorizing, and methodology, as well as for practice.

The core role of leadership is to mobilize and motivate members for pursuits that serve the organization's purpose, such as organizational strategy. The concept of meaning-based leadership, leader advocacy of the meaning organizational purpose gives to the work, was proposed in recognition of this role. We study the indirect influence of team leader meaning-based leadership on team strategy implementation (efforts to put organizational strategy into practice) as it is mediated by team value alignment – team similarity with top management in perceptions of organizational values. We propose that higher-level meaning-based leadership – the meaning-based leadership from the team leader's direct superior – moderates the influence of team leader meaning-based leadership: team leader meaning-based leadership is a stronger influence on team value alignment and, mediated by team value alignment, team strategy implementation with more higher-level meaning-based leadership. We found support for this research model in a survey of N = 421 teams from an energy company.

Leaders need to consider employees both as distinct individuals and as integral members of a collective to effectively address their needs. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), this study examines how individual- and collective-focused leader behaviors address employees’ autonomy, relatedness, and competence need satisfaction, influencing their intentions and behaviors. We propose that individual-focused behaviors (empowering leadership) address employees’ need for autonomy, while collective-focused behaviors (identity leadership) address their need for relatedness. Moreover, we argue that combining empowering and identity leadership addresses employees’ competence need satisfaction. We pre-registered a scenario-based experiment (N = 226) and a time-lagged field study (N = 308) to test the following hypotheses: (1) empowering leadership predicts autonomy need satisfaction, reducing turnover intentions; (2) identity leadership predicts relatedness need satisfaction, increasing organizational citizenship behavior (OCB); and (3) empowering and identity leadership interact to predict competence need satisfaction, resulting in higher work effort. Results from both studies support the hypothesized effects, except for the interaction effects in the field study. Together, these findings underscore that it is important for leaders to integrate individual- and collective-focused behaviors to holistically address employees’ psychological needs and foster positive work-related outcomes.

Drawing on social exchange theory, this meta-analysis integrates 45 independent samples (N = 12,696) to examine the relationships between leader humor, employee creativity, and innovative behavior. We further explore how these relationships are moderated by national culture and employee sample gender composition. Results reveal that leader humor is positively related to both creativity and innovative behavior, though the relationship with creativity is significantly stronger. At the broad contextual level, specific dimensions of national culture moderate the relationship between leader humor and creativity: individualism positively moderates this relationship, whereas uncertainty avoidance and restraint act as negative moderators. However, national culture does not significantly moderate the relationship between leader humor and innovative behavior. At the local contextual level, employee gender composition plays a key moderating role: leader humor's relationship with creativity is stronger in female-dominated samples, while its relationship with innovative behavior is stronger in male-dominated samples. These findings contribute to reconciling previous inconsistencies and highlight the importance of considering both broad and local contextual factors in future leadership research.

Developing others is a core component of effective leadership in many leadership theories. However, prior research has focused primarily on observable developmental behaviors, leaving a gap in understanding the self-concepts that may underlie and sustain such behaviors. We extend current theory by suggesting that developing others can be a part of leaders’ core identity that impacts followers. We create and validate the developmental self-concept (DeSC) scale to assess the extent to which leaders construe developing others as central to their leader identity, feel efficacious in fostering follower growth, and feel motivated to do so. Across four studies, we establish the DeSC's psychometric properties and predictive utility. Study 1 supports a three-factor structure with an overarching DeSC factor. Study 2 provides convergent and discriminant validity evidence relative to relevant constructs. Study 3 demonstrates predictive validity in a dyadic field study, with leaders’ DeSC scores predicting direct-report ratings of leadership behaviors and follower outcomes. Study 4 further demonstrates predictive validity in judgment and decision contexts, with higher DeSC scores predicting stronger preferences for developmentally oriented job candidates and greater perceived value alignment with a developmental organization. Overall, the DeSC offers a new tool for studying developmental leadership as an identity-based construct and for evaluating leader development efforts with implications for shaping organizational cultures.

Despite the potential for leaders to enrich workplaces for their subordinates, multinational data show that employees experience little enrichment at work. Based on existing theory, the blame often falls on leaders. Many suggest that leaders are either naïve about work design or worse: they purposely create work environments with low enrichment. This paper offers an alternative: followers may naturally avoid enriched tasks due to an underappreciated sampling effect. Specifically, individuals avoid sampling alternatives with greater risk, even if those alternatives provide benefits in the long run. As such, leaders are at risk of falling into a trap in which efforts to increase enrichment may have the negative consequence of turning employees away from such tasks. We develop and analyze a simulation to demonstrate that the simple assumptions specified by the model are sufficient to yield patterns that qualitatively resemble real-world observations. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.