Shared Leadership and Team Learning: Roles of Knowledge Sharing and Team Characteristics

Many organizations adopt work teams to increase performance or achieve specific organizational goals. However, there are still many unrevealed issues in teams’ operation although the researches of teams have been concerned by many studies. Previous researches indicated that team learning is an important strategy that organizations could obtain to gain the competition advantages. In addition, leadership is thought as the critical factor which could achieve the effectiveness of teams. Also, knowledge could enhance and maintain the competition advantages of organizations while knowledge sharing could accumulate knowledge, improve capability, and be the important factor of organizational learning. This study included thirty-five work teams to investigate the mutual relationships among shared leadership, knowledge sharing, team characteristics and team learning. The results indicate that shared leadership significantly and positively affects team learning. However, knowledge sharing mediates the shared leadership and team learning. In addition, team characteristics moderate the relationship between shared leadership and team learning.