Shared Leadership: A Post-heroic Perspective On Leadership As A Collective Construction

Within the field of leadership practices, there is an emergent movement towards viewing leadership in terms of collaboration between two or more persons. At the same time, traditional literature on leadership and organization theory has been dominated almost exclusively by the perspective that leadership is something that is exercised by a single person - the idea of unitary command (Pearce & Manz, 2005). This has been challenged by the theoretical perspective of post heroic leadership, of which one practical consequence is to view leadership activities as collective rather than individual. In this paper, the authors argue that by shifting perspective from viewing leadership as a single-person activity to viewing it as collective construction processes.