Question

1) Briefly explain what are the advantages and disadvantages of shared leadership?

Answer 1

Shared leadership is helpful when managing organizational change; it retains and strengthens a decentralized management structure, giving an overall sense of empowerment as well as requiring extra effort from those individuals who take part in the process. The process of shared leadership defines, links, and aligns policy decision-making with implementation. It defines accountability and decision-making through shared responsibility and built-in checks and balances. Shared leadership makes collaboration better and relies heavily on good communication; it emphasizes process and participations. It provides empowerment for members of organisation. The leadership structure ensures program and service quality/consistency in harmony. It incorporates planning, review, and adjustments which allows revisiting mission, vision, and values.Shared leadership balances ammount of work, builds in cross-training and redundancy to reduce the impact of personnel changes, takes advantage of people's unique skills and expertise. Sharing leadership does not cost significantly more money.

Besides the positive aspects, there are a number of disadvantages to shared leadership. In her masters thesis on shared governance, Kristine Lessard describes these disadvantages:

It slows decision-making because there are more individuals involved than the traditional hierarchy; it slows implementation because it takes more time to communicate and achieve consensus, and to plan and assess when there are more participants. Strategic initiatives such as implementing new programs and services can suffer because administrators are busy elsewhere.While there has been encountered some of the "disadvantages"-for example, decision-making is often slower, but at the same time the college makes better informed decisions-most have not been a part of the shared leadership experience. Nevertheless, institutions must consider these issues carefully before start using a shared governance/shared leadership