Collective achievement, cohesive support, complementary expertise: 3Cs emergent model for shared leadership

ABSTRACT Society is asking for a shared leadership approach to deal with diverse, complex, and dynamic situations. Existing studies on shared leadership, however, lack clear theoretical analysis and/or sufficient empirical evidence. To fill this research gap, this article first clarifies conceptual ambiguities regarding shared leadership. Second, inspired by social exchange theory (SET) and emergence theory on team cooperation, it proposes a novel model, 3Cs, to characterize shared leadership through three dimensions: collective achievement leadership, cohesive support leadership, and complementary expertise leadership. This model explains how macro-level shared leadership phenomenon emerges through micro individual behaviours, and is compatible with but more concrete and comprehensive than the current understanding of shared leadership in either a composition form (i.e., team members perform homogeneous leadership behaviours) or a compilation form (i.e., team members perform heterogeneous leadership behaviours). A mixed-methods approach combining a qualitative study on 12 international graduate students in a leadership programme and a quantitative study on 86 leaders and 370 team members from Chinese enterprises was conducted to confirm the validity of the proposed model. This model provides human resource development (HRD) professionals with a comprehensively practical approach regarding how to develop shared leadership.