Abstract

Shared leadership has recently attracted attention as the leadership that promotes team effectiveness in the organizational context, but the scale with high validity is very insufficient. The purpose of this study was to conceptualize shared leadership characteristics as being shared among team members and develop a shared leadership scale with content validity. In Study 1, we conducted in-depth interviews with 10 team members who were now practicing shared leadership in their teams. Then, we operationally defined shared leadership based on both literature reviews and in-depth interviews. It is composed of four factors: (1) identity of a shared leader (2) support and consideration (3) voluntary work performance (4) horizontal work interaction. Integrating similar item contents of previous scales and reflecting the shared leadership behavior statement derived from in-depth interviews, 40 preliminary items were constructed. In Study 2, two groups of experts and employees (naive judges) were used to examine the two content validity of the items constructed in Study 1. The results of the two content validity analyses showed that the scale consists of 28 items satisfying the quantitative criteria. Moreover, we revised some item expressions to effectively reflect the representative behavior of shared leadership based on the free opinions of experts and employees judge. Finally, the implications, limitations, and future research directions of this study were discussed based upon the above finding.