MGT 647 Module 4 Shared Leadership Example

Who Leads When Everyone Can? Building Shared Leadership in Lakeshore Mutual's Claims App Team

Student Name

Master of Business Administration, Aspen University

MGT 647: Project Management Integration Framework

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Who Leads When Everyone Can? Building Shared Leadership in Lakeshore Mutual's Claims App Team

Lakeshore Mutual's claims app team has used Scrum for six months. It releases features to adjusters every two weeks, and policyholders in the pilot like the app. But a retrospective surfaced a pattern: the technology manager who formed the team still assigns most tasks, decides technical disputes and represents the team to executives. Team members wait for direction. Scrum's practices are in place, but the self-management they assume is not. This paper diagnoses the problem and plans how to share leadership.

Diagnosis

Three things keep leadership concentrated. The manager was rewarded for delivery in the old system and fears that stepping back will slow the team. Team members came from departments where they were told what to do and have little practice deciding together. And executives still call the manager, not the product owner, when they want to know about the app, which reinforces the old pattern.

What Produces Shared Leadership

Carson et al. (2007) studied consulting teams of MBA students working with client organizations and examined what led to shared leadership, meaning that influence and direction come from several members at once instead of a single appointed head. They found two kinds of antecedents. The first was an internal team environment of three parts: shared purpose, in which members understand and focus on common goals; social support, in which members encourage and recognize one another; and voice, in which members contribute input and take part in decisions. The second was coaching from an external leader, which mattered most when the internal environment was weak. Shared leadership in turn predicted team performance as rated by clients.

The finding suggests a path for Lakeshore. The team's purpose is clear to the product owner but less so to members, support is uneven and voice is low. The manager's best contribution may be as an external coach who helps build that environment.

Why It Is Worth the Effort

Wang et al. (2014) statistically combined the findings of earlier team studies and reported that shared leadership and team effectiveness rise together. The relationship held across types of shared leadership and was stronger when work was complex, which describes building a claims app that must satisfy adjusters, policyholders and the claims system at once.

Empowerment

Kirkman and Rosen (1999) studied work teams in several organizations and described team empowerment through four dimensions: potency, the team's belief that it can be effective; meaningfulness, the sense that its work matters; autonomy, freedom to decide how to work; and impact, the sense that its work makes a difference to the organization. More empowered teams were more productive and proactive and gave better customer service, and their members were more satisfied and committed. External team leader behavior, production and service responsibilities, team human resource policies and social structure were among the antecedents. Empowerment, on this view, is partly granted: the organization must give teams responsibility and information, not only tell them to lead.

Leadership Functions Now and in Six Months

The Manager's New Role

The manager moves outside the team as its coach and advocate. That role includes building shared purpose by explaining how the app fits the company's claims strategy, protecting the team from interruptions, coaching team members who take on new leadership functions and redirecting executive questions to the product owner. The manager stops attending the daily scrum after the first month of the change.

Building the Internal Environment

Each of Carson and colleagues' three conditions gets a specific practice. For shared purpose, the product owner opens each sprint planning with five minutes on what adjusters and policyholders said in the last review, so members hear the purpose from users rather than from a manager. For social support, the retrospective ends with each member naming one thing a teammate did that helped. For voice, the Scrum Master uses a round at sprint planning in which each member speaks on the plan before discussion opens, which keeps the most senior engineers from setting the direction before others have spoken.

What Executives Must Do

Empowerment depends on people outside the team. Executives must send questions about the app to the product owner and attend sprint reviews to get updates there. The chief information officer has agreed to give the team authority to release to policyholders without separate approval once the definition of done is met, and to share claims cost and satisfaction data with the team each month, so its members can see the impact of their work.

Setbacks to Expect

Progress will be uneven. When a release goes badly, the pull to return to the manager will be strong, both for the manager and for the team. The plan treats such a moment as a test: the team runs the post-release review itself, and the manager coaches without taking over.

Judging Progress

The team will repeat a short survey on purpose, support and voice, and Kirkman and Rosen's four empowerment dimensions, every quarter. Sprint goal success and adjuster satisfaction will show whether results hold. The manager and the Scrum Master will also note, each sprint, which decisions came back to the manager and why, since a decision that keeps returning points to a missing skill, missing information or missing authority that the plan must address. After two quarters, the team and the chief information officer will look back together and decide whether to use the same approach with the Kanban support team and the planned second Scrum team on the policy migration's feature stream.

Conclusion

Carson, Tesluk and Marrone explain what produces shared leadership, Wang, Waldman and Zhang show why it pays, and Kirkman and Rosen describe the empowerment the company must grant. Moving specific functions and changing the manager's role turn those findings into a plan.

References

Carson, J. B., Tesluk, P. E., & Marrone, J. A. (2007). Shared leadership in teams: An investigation of antecedent conditions and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 50(5), 1217-1234. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.20159921

Kirkman, B. L., & Rosen, B. (1999). Beyond self-management: Antecedents and consequences of team empowerment. Academy of Management Journal, 42(1), 58-74. https://doi.org/10.2307/256874

Wang, D., Waldman, D. A., & Zhang, Z. (2014). A meta-analysis of shared leadership and team effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(2), 181-198. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034531