Purpose: The purpose of this study is to sort out the potential dark sides of shared leadership so as to promote a more comprehensive and balanced views of the impact of shared leadership and provide directions for future research.Design/methodology/approach: Through extensive database and manual searches, 766 literature records were obtained. After three rounds of literature screening, 17 studies were retained. On this basis, the 17 studies were coded and analyzed.Findings: From the perspectives of individual motivation, hierarchical functionalism and leadership role configuration, the existing studies have explored the negative impacts of shared leadership on team members, formal team leaders and the overall work teams. Specifically, for team members, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like power struggle, role stress and knowledge hiding. For formal team leaders, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like psychological territorial loss, leadership motivation declines and the dualistic paradox of self and group. For the overall work teams, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like team performance inhibition, low decision-making efficiency, team responsibility dispersion and team creativity decline. Meanwhile, contextual factors play a key role in determining the effects of shared leadership.Originality/value: Through a systematic review of the negative impact of shared leadership, this study responds to the research calls for exploring the dark sides of shared leadership, provides the academic community with a more comprehensive and balanced view of the impact of shared leadership and identifies several directions for future research.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to reveal a sequential mediating process of the impact of shared leadership on team performance by studying the sequential mediating effect of team trust and team learning behavior.Design/methodology/approach: This study develops and examines a sequential mediation model using the meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) method. The sample adopted consists of 347 independent effect sizes extracted from 280 empirical papers (288 independent studies, N = 21,888 groups).Findings: The results indicate that team trust and team learning behavior play a sequential mediating effect in the shared leadership–team performance relationship.Practical implications: The findings suggest that practitioners should share leadership functions and responsibilities among talented team members. Furthermore, practitioners should strengthen the emotional interaction among team members and give positive feedback to the team's intensive learning behaviors.Originality/value: By identifying the sequential mediating effect of team trust and team learning behavior, this study not only advances the understandings of a comprehensive mediating process through which shared leadership enhances team performance, but also offers new insights into the interrelationship of different types of mediating mechanisms (i.e. team emergent state and team process) in the shared leadership–team performance relationship.

Although the detrimental effects of exploitative leadership have been widely revealed, scholarly understanding of its formation mechanisms remains insufficient. Addressing this gap, the present study draws upon trait activation theory to investigate the antecedents and formation mechanisms of exploitative leadership through the dual lenses of personality traits and organizational contexts. Through an empirical examination of questionnaire data from 422 leader–subordinate dyads in Chinese organizations, the results of this study reveal that: three leader personality traits—self-interest, other-oriented perfectionism, and high power distance orientation—significantly and positively predict exploitative leadership behaviors; three organizational contexts—task challenge, flexible status conferral, and leader–subordinate goal misalignment—likewise serve as positive predictors of exploitative leadership behaviors; through trait activation effects, flexible status conferral significantly strengthens the positive relationships between all three personality traits and exploitative leadership, while task challenge and goal misalignment specifically amplify the positive relationships of exploitative leadership with high power distance orientation and self-interested personality, respectively. The research findings are of great value for improving the theoretical framework of exploitative leadership and guiding management practice.