Shared Leadership and Team Creativity: Construction Industry Perspective

Abstract

The construction industry is a multiteam continuum, where in addition to the civil engineers, a wide array of experts and tradesmen provide necessary inputs to complete projects on time and schedule. Such essential inputs are provided by the skilled teams working in parallel and along with the civil engineers, but through separate leaders who are usually led by a project manager who is often a civil engineer or an architect. However, it is a growing concern that if such teams are given more autonomy in the form of shared leadership, it can lead to extended team creativity in a construction project. This study attempts to evaluate such an argument. This study also considers a mediating role of “professional identity salience” that highlights the fact that team members realize their specific professional roles in particular teams and then strive for better knowledge and performance. A moderating role of team coordination is then introduced in this study to assess professional identity salience effect to enhance team creativity. The authors collected a time-lagged data set from 84 working teams in construction projects. The analysis showed that professional identity salience positively mediates the link between shared leadership and team creativity. Furthermore, this relationship is also found to be moderated by the level of team coordination. Based on the results, this study explains how, when, and why shared leadership improves creativity in construction project teams. This study aims to help project managers to understand the shared leadership concept and its implementation in construction projects to enhance team creativity.