The impact of heterogeneous shared leadership in scientific teams

Leadership is evolving dynamically from an individual endeavor to shared efforts. This paper aims to advance our understanding of shared leadership in scientific teams. We define three kinds of leaders, junior (10-15), mid (15-20), and senior (20+) based on career age. By considering the combinations of any two leaders, we distinguish shared leadership as heterogeneous when leaders are in different age cohorts and homogeneous when leaders are in the same age cohort. Drawing on 1,845,351 CS, 254,039 Sociology, and 193,338 Business teams with two leaders in the OpenAlex dataset, we identify that heterogeneous shared leadership brings higher citation impact for teams than homogeneous shared leadership. Specifically, when junior leaders are paired with senior leaders, it significantly increases team citation ranking by 1-2 %, in comparison with two leaders of similar age. We explore the patterns between homogeneous leaders and heterogeneous leaders from team scale, expertise composition, and knowledge recency perspectives. Compared with homogeneous leaders, heterogeneous leaders are more impactful in large teams, have more diverse expertise, and trace both the newest and oldest references.

Automated summary

This paper examines the role of shared leadership in scientific teams and finds that heterogeneous shared leadership has a greater impact on team citation. In particular, when junior leaders are paired with senior leaders, the team citation ranking can significantly increase by 1-2% compared to two leaders of similar age.