The New Landscape of Shared Leadership

In 1968 Drucker identified both the dawning of the age of knowledge work and that how to organise knowledge work would be one of the major management challenges of the coming decades.  At the time, the general organisational model focused on a top-down command-and-control model of leadership.  Since then there have been major shifts toward what has ultimately crystallised into shared leadership for organising knowledge work. While some broad brush empirical research has clearly demonstrated that shared leadership organising principles generate excess rents for organisations, scant work has examined the fine toothed mechanisms that engender shared leadership in organisations.  Accordingly, this talk will focus on several in-depth ethnographic studies, combined with several quantitative examinations, to identify the landscape of research opportunities ahead regarding shared leadership within and across organisations.