Shared Leadership and Culture: Potential Emergence and Global Application

The intersection of organizational leadership and cultural values represents a fruitful area of understanding for scholars and practitioners interested in improving organizational success. Some scholars have questioned the exclusive focus on leadership as a top-down (vertical) process and have begun to consider the role of shared leadership, which is a mutual and reciprocal influence process among members of an organizational group. Shared leadership has shown promise as an effective form of leadership in several empirical studies, but the impact of cultural values on the effectiveness of shared leadership has not been considered. In this paper, I review empirical findings on shared leadership, and suggest that the cultural dimensions of individualism/collectivism and power distance are relevant to both the natural emergence and successful global implementation of shared leadership.