Shared leadership in the context of change: A Saudi Arabian case study

Abstract

Leadership is a major research subject for many scholars, and approaches to the study of leadership range from a concern for distinctions between leaders and leadership, the role of leadership in strategy and strategic decision-making, behavioural approaches to leadership, systems and network approaches, including those that encompass complex adaptive systems and enduring concerns for leadership through and beyond organisations, system-wide change, and sharing of authority through shared leadership. Shared leadership and its impact on teams and organisations have been major research concerns for decades. Shared leadership is a horizontal style of leading, unlike traditional leadership behaviour, and focuses on team collective leadership. The term describes a team process that distributes leadership among team members, empowering each member to act as a leader instead of relying on a single designated leader. Traditional leadership and shared leadership are not interchangeable; rather, they act to complement one another. Given that the case study and the research time frame align with a period of discontinuous change for the organisation.

This PhD thesis aims to identify and investigate shared leadership practices within a case study organisation undergoing a process of change. It identifies within the literature the factors that affect the development of shared leadership practices and how these factors impact the accomplishment of organisational change. In doing so, it constructs a model of shared leadership in practice and dimensionises how that model operates in an empirical setting. The researcher utilised a qualitative approach to collect the data for this study from a Saudi commercial organisation. The researcher collected the data through semi-structured interviews. The researcher applied the embedded case study approach because they conducted the study in three different regions of one commercial organisation. The study sample consisted of branch managers, heads of departments, and branch members. The researcher interviewed the case CEO, five branch managers, three heads of departments, and 17 team members across the three regions.

This PhD thesis has provided a deeper understanding of the empirical implementation of shared leadership, specifically within the context of organisational change. The conceptual model of shared leadership in practice provides an opportunity to empirically explore how key factors of shared leadership operate in a real-world environment. It makes a useful contribution to the growing body of shared leadership literature. The conceptual model yielded useful insights for identifying shared leadership practices within the case study organisation. The researcher was able to gain a comprehensive understanding of the empirical implementation of these factors and their impact on shared leadership practices, particularly in the context of organisational change. The conceptual model effectively facilitated the identification of shared leadership practices within the case study organisation and explored the influence of these factors on the successful implementation of organisational change in Saudi commercial organisations.