Using Shared Leadership to Foster Knowledge Sharing in Information Systems Development Projects

Information systems development (ISD) projects are enormously complex, requiring input from heterogeneous team members with a varied array of knowledge and skills. Because expertise in an ISD project is broad and complex, this expertise is not possessed by an individual developer but distributed among team members who are selected for their expertise in the relevant domains. In addition to working cooperatively and integrating tasks, team members must exchange knowledge in order to complete the assigned project. This enormous dependence on knowledge sharing creates extensive burdens for coordination and communication on both project managers and relevant domain experts throughout all stages of the ISD project. This paper conceptualizes the benefits of a combination of vertical and shared leadership in ISD project teams, as proposed by Pearce and maps this structure to related early work on the dynamics and productivity of programming teams (most notably, Weinberg's Egoless Programming Team Structure).