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Title: 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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1933803 2303038
NSF-PAR ID:
10490455
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Elsevier
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Information Processing & Management
Volume:
61
Issue:
1
ISSN:
0306-4573
Page Range / eLocation ID:
103542
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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