Shared Leadership and Organizational Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

For a long time, leadership has been viewed as a ‘great man’ construct where an individual has the power, qualities, and position to influence others towards the achievement of a given goal or objective. However, that has changed. Heroic leadership can no longer meet the expectations being placed on leadership. Today’s organizations are also faced with drastically changing trends and turbulent landscapes. This has emphasized the need for top-notch leadership to guarantee organizational success in an economically globalized context. There is a growing interest in leadership forms that focus more on sharing the responsibility of leadership between different individuals with different capabilities and qualities. One of these forms of leadership is shared leadership. In today’s turbulent business environment, an organization’s success is determined by its resilience through difficult times. Given that success has been linked to leadership, this systematic review aims to review the extant literature on the link between shared leadership and organizational resilience. The systematic review entailed searching relevant and reliable literature in various databases such as, Emerald, Google Scholar, APA PsycNet, Researchgate, and JSTOR using keywords (shared leadership, organization resilience, relationship, and impact of shared leadership on organizational resilience) primarily through Boolean operators. The initial search resulted in 200 articles, which were filtered using the study’s inclusion and exclusion criteria resulting in 43 articles that were reviewed in this study. They culminated into a proposed integrated model appreciating the urgency of shared leadership in today’s business environment. The review shows that the connection between shared leadership and organizational resilience has not received a lot of attention, making it a potential area for future studies.