Do self-organizing teams promote shared leadership and team performance in crisis management?

This study aims to examine how team structure (self-organizing vs functional) influences the emergence of shared leadership and its relationship with team performance in crisis management settings. Forty-eight four-person teams completed a dynamic firefighting simulation (C3Fire) under either self-organizing or functionally assigned roles. Shared leadership was assessed via social network metrics (density and centralization) across four trials, alongside objective measures of team performance. While both team structures exhibited shared leadership, self-organizing teams displayed lower leadership centralization and performed better overall. Leadership density did not predict team performance. Centralization decreased over time in self-organizing teams, which may reflect adaptive leadership emergence. The use of a simulated microworld may limit the generalizability of the findings to real-world settings. Future research should explore behavioral indicators of leadership emergence and examine professional teams in real-world crisis contexts. Organizations should foster flexible team structures and support role negotiation to enable adaptive and decentralized leadership. Simulation-based training may enhance team responsiveness under crisis conditions. This study provides empirical evidence on how structural conditions shape the emergence of shared leadership in dynamic, high-stakes environments. It distinguishes between leadership intensity and distribution, and supports adaptive leadership theory by highlighting the role of structural decentralization and temporal dynamics.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Team Performance Management

• Publication date

  2025-11-12

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1108/tpm-02-2025-0026
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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