Leading Strategicially

1/23/2021 Shared and Distributed Leadership

https://leocontent.umgc.edu/content/umuc/tgs/mba/mba670/2211/learning-topic-list/shared-and-distributedleadership.html?ou=541222 1/2

Shared and Distributed Leadership

Traditional approaches to leadership emphasize the empowerment of subordinates to

make an individual leader more effective. With this approach, the focus is on the process

by which leaders enable others to share responsibility for leadership functions. This model

assumes that distributed leadership and power sharing are inevitable in organizations, and

the organizations cannot be understood by focusing solely on the decisions and actions of

individual leaders. Namely, strategic leadership "empowers others to participate in the

process of interpreting events, solving problems, and making decisions" (Argyris, 1964;

Likert, 1967).

This perspective recognizes that the actions of any individual leader are less important

than the collective leadership provided by many members of the organization (Day, Gronn,

& Salas, 2004). Viewing leadership in terms of reciprocal, recursive influence processes

among multiple leaders is different from studying unidirectional effects of a single leader

on subordinates.

"Distributed leadership involves multiple leaders with distinct but interrelated

responsibilities. If the various leaders are unable to agree about what to do and how to do

it, performance of the team or organization is likely to suffer" (Mehra, Smith, Dixon, &

Robertson, 2006).

References

Argyris, C. (1964). Integrating the individual and the organization. New York: John Wiley.

Day, D. V., Gronn, P., & Salas, E. (2004). Leadership capacity in teams. Leadership

Quarterly, 15, 857–880.

Likert, R. (1967). The human organization: Its management and value. New York: McGraw-

Hill.

Learning Topic

1/23/2021 Shared and Distributed Leadership

https://leocontent.umgc.edu/content/umuc/tgs/mba/mba670/2211/learning-topic-list/shared-and-distributedleadership.html?ou=541222 2/2

Mehra, A., Smith, B., Dixon, A., & Robertson, B. (2006). Distributed leadership in teams:

The network of leadership perceptions and team performance. Leadership Quarterly, 17,

232–245.

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