Shared Leadership, Self-Efficacy, and Team Proactive Effectiveness in a Theoretical Conceptual Framework: Management in Crisis

Introduction

Research on organizational crisis effectiveness has been prominent over the decades because of the occurrence of a variety of types of crisis in past decades and its repercussions on organization survival (Faulkner, 2001). However, in recent times, business environment leaders are challenged with unexpected new natures of crisis which are unprecedented, large scale and unbounded. OECD (2011) stated that unbounded crisis, such as spread of viruses and terrorists, may develop to become a costly “global shock” threatening a combination of different global systems as health, social, financial and/or climate systems. Traditional organizational structures and processes become insufficient while unforeseen events like 11 September 2001, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the latest Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 occur. Recently, the new demands of shifting to online work and virtual teamwork in organizations create new leadership challenges.

Scholars from different disciplines as psychology, public administration, business and others offered interesting links between crisis theory and its practices (Fowler et al., 2007). Team leadership has become a prominent approach of crisis-ridden organizations. Houghton et al. (2003) demonstrated the urgency to expand the traditional leadership research which relies on formal leaders to study new team leadership approaches, as shared leadership concept, in the increased investment of organizations in its skilled professionals. However, Burke et al. (2003) revealed that the effectiveness is not guaranteed in all team leadership approaches because of the lack of coordination between team members.

Cloudman and Hallahan (2006) recommended considering the team proactivity approach in crisis management to reduce the crisis’ negative influences by consistently acquiring the needed strategic competencies for prevention and preparedness for potential crisis (Jaques, 2007). For that reason, we may argue that team proactivity is a predictor to a successful crisis management process. However, we found out that exploring the team proactivity concept, its antecedents, its mediating and moderating effects and its consequences are slightly studied in organizational research comparing to the individual proactivity.

In addition, this study also considers the shared leadership concept, this approach is gaining increased interest in the studies of team leadership. Pearce and Conger (2003) defined shared leadership as “a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both”. The “dynamic interactive influence process among individuals” in shared leadership teams makes the difference with the traditional teams where the social interactions are limited to downward and upward influence processes (Xu and Zhao, 2022). In specific crisis situations and its repercussions on job performance, traditional leadership loses on its power on maintaining the traditional role of leaders in communication, control and performance assessment. So that, team leadership approaches may be more suitable in crisis management. In 1982, Johnson & Johnson adopted the shared leadership approach to face the Tylenol crisis. Same in 2018, Southwest Airlines relied on their shared leadership to become proactive on safety issues. However, little is known about antecedents and consequences of shared leadership in theory (Petrie et al., 2021). More specifically, theoretical studies lack of understanding how the human-level constructs may impact the development constructs of team leadership. In this paper, it is assumed that it is worthy to explore how individual self-efficacy beliefs may have a significant relationship with the shared leadership concept.