Shared Leadership in a Simulated High Stakes Environment

Abstract

Shared leadership is an increasingly relevant approach to team dynamics in complex, high-stakes environments. This thesis explores how vertical leadership styles (initiating structure, transactional, and transformational), individual adaptive capacity, and teamwork influence the development of shared leadership. Using archival data collected over a five-year period from the NASA Flight Operations Center – Unified Simulation (FOCUS) Lab at Middle Tennessee State University, the study analyzes how leadership perceptions and behaviors affect shared leadership emergence within simulated aviation dispatch center teams. Participants included undergraduate students assigned to specialized operational roles in teams of approximately ten. Measures included self-assessments by formal leaders and peer ratings of leadership behavior, adaptability, and teamwork. Results revealed that team member perceptions of transactional leadership were positively associated with shared leadership, while team perception of leadership’s initiating structure exhibited a moderate negative relationship. Transformational leadership showed a positive correlation with shared leadership, although the results were constrained by data limitations. Individual adaptive capacity and teamwork did not significantly predict shared leadership emergence. These findings offer implications for leadership development, especially in environments requiring coordinated decision-making and distributed expertise.