Nationality Divides and Shared Leadership in Multinational Teams

How shared leadership is enacted in teams that are nationally diverse is currently under- researched, despite the increasing presence of multinational teams in the workplace. To better understand the phenomenon of shared leadership in multinational team contexts, we propose two ways in which nationality-based characteristics of members may divide teams and affect leadership. We argue that the national belonging of members may result in both identity subgroups and status ranks. However, the configurational properties of identity subgroups and status ranks will have distinct effects on team dynamics, shared leadership within the team, and team performance. We conduct two empirical studies, and find that the number and balance of identity subgroups have important implications for multinational team functioning, in line with social identity approaches. Interestingly, the number and balance of status ranks also affects shared leadership, but not as hypothesized.