Does Shared Leadership Eliminate the Notion of Followership in Organizations?

This text explains the concept of leadership in the context of shared leadership within organizations by highlighting the model of followership in organizational change. Even if the shared leadership is established through the leader of the team, members of a team can have responsibilities and they can influence each other. But this theory of shared leadership raises limits such as the notion of trust for example. A good follower capacity of team member allows the success of this model; this is why we can use the term shared follower instead of shared leadership.

In a world that is constantly changing and changing, it is important for organizations to consider the most appropriate ways to achieve the goals. Person leadership is a concept that is at the heart of organizational change: it involves the three key factors of an organization: man, influence and exercise of power and achievement of goals.
However, the need for leadership is changing and the methods implemented, studied, scrutinized, modeled and theorized throughout the 20th century are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of these organizations. To anticipate, it is a question of questioning oneself and of exploring other possible ones by relying on the acquired knowledge and the constructions of previous models to make evolve the perspectives.
Thus, if all achievement is collective, then it is a matter of understanding the relationships, places, roles and functioning of each in this collective construction in order to develop a response to the future of the notion of followership in a context of shared leadership within organizations.
Do theories of individual-oriented leadership and followership shed light on the processes involved in shared leadership? Is there a difference of nature in the terms of leadership according to whether one is in the theory of leadership and shared leadership? Why eliminate the term follower, is it embarrassing?

Key Concepts
This subject can apply to all forms of organization and is not restricted to the sole field of the company, moreover the recency of the studies on shared leadership makes that there is no meta model on the subject, and that if this research is dynamic, models fit into working environments located (in the world of education, hospitable mainly). To try to answer the question I need to rely on studies in specific professional contexts and generalize them. That's why I propose elements of definition allowing to globalize the discussion. In the sociology of organizations, theories of organizations, management and management sciences, an organization is a set of individuals or groups of individuals interacting. They have a collective goal but the preferences, the information, the interests and the knowledge can diverge.
The notion of purpose shows the fact that an organization is an object built in order to carry out certain activities within the framework of a project and seeking to achieve a certain number of goals. An organization fits into an external environment that is itself composed of actors and other organizations, with whom it has exchange relations. It is autonomous, deciding the nature of its activities, its projects and its goals. It is however dependent on its environment. The nature of the project and the goals to be pursued is a negotiation issue between the participants in the organization. participation in an organization has a voluntary dimension but at the same time induces a set of constraints.
From these elements can highlight organizational paradoxes, it is at the same time: -a structured whole, binding for the participants by the respect of the rules, a place of frustrations, tensions and conflicts and a dynamic collective construction which authorizes the realization of a common project, a place of blooming.
-a place of confrontation, of divergent interests, of conflicts and a harmonious system of cooperation in equilibrium.
-a structured framework of authoritarian essence and a voluntary membership of the participants-an embedded and dependent actor and an autonomous actor, an active unit.
-a requirement of regularity, efficiency, stability (order, exploitation) and a requirement of change, evolution of novelty (innovation, exploration).

Leadership in its Individual Perspective
Leadership is a concept that can be defined as the ability of individuals or groups of individuals to influence other individuals or groups of individuals. The description that one can make of it is a relation of temporary and reciprocal confidence. The leader must as much have confidence in the group that the majority of the group has confidence in him.
It manifests itself in its ability to federate and mobilize the energies around a collective action and results in a formal or informal, explicit or implicit election, during which the majority of the members of the group recognize one of their own as the leader. Legitimates and delegates to it its decision-making power, i.e., their own freedom to think.
This description can summarize all the work, research and concepts built around this phenomenon that is the leadership of people or leadership since the creation of the psychology of human relations, sociology of organizations, and other sciences concerned about the interaction of individuals within an organization during the 20th century in the post-war period.
Theories of leadership are primarily viewed from a hierarchical perspective, although everyone agrees that it can be exercised by other people than the boss, the boss... They have been very focused on, the behaviors of the leaders and from the point of view of situational contingency.
It must also be taken into account that a leader is not just a manager: A manager is a manager who simply applies the rules and treats others to their course of action. He may be section chief, service director or vice-president. He is primarily interested in systems and procedures, enjoys stability and conforms to established codes. A leader has the ability to influence the behavior of others. The leader knows how to inspire confidence and look after the interests of the members of his group, renew the working methods, ask the right questions and take constructive initiatives. He is interested in the results. He brings his subordinates to perform their tasks using his personal influence and persuasive power. He achieves his ends by procuring the help of others.
In the contemporary world, the leader must possess abilities in the technical field and in the field of interpersonal relations. It must be easy to conceptualize and communicate. In addition, he must have the following qualities: -creativity; -the sensibility; -be visionary; -flexibility (adapt); -concentration (focusing on one objective at a time); -patience.

Follower and Followership
It is from the 1980s that the idea of follower is more active than passive in its definition. This is of great interest to the research community (Baker, 2007). He mentions that the literature on leadership and followership seems to suggest that the leader-hero paradigm is over to give way to a more active and participative view of followers. Thus, the author claims that the new vision of active followership is shared by theoreticians and is based on four basic principles: -Followers and leaders are not people, but roles; -The followers are active, not passive; -Followers and leaders have common goals; -Followers and leaders must be studied in the context of their relationship.
In general, followers expect their leader to be honest, honest and conscientious, and to have an interest in them as an individual (Hansen, 1987). The respect of its expectations leads to the consent of the followers to follow the directions of the leader. According to the description of the author, followership seems to occur mainly by imitation.
In followership literature, a follower is a member of an organization or group that interacts and reports to the authority or agrees to refer to it. This authority may come from another group or another member of the organization, who is designated as a leader (Chaleff, 1995;Fobbs, 2010;Kellerman, 2008;Kelley, 1992).
Finding a definition of followership that is useful for my problem is a challenge, there are many that do not always envisage the same phenomena. The most complete definition is that followership is the set of processes (affective, cognitive, and metacognitive) that govern follower behavior and style in interactions and influence processes with the leader (Chaleff, 2009;Fobbs, 2010;Kelley, 2008;Lord & Emrich, 2000). In this definition, it misses the common goal to reach and the will for the follower to follow the leader.
To clarify this, the follower would be the person with a specific state of mind (willingness to act for the good of the organization and his team, attitude of cooperation, etc.) and followership would be the process that operates when this person is in action. Therefore, the follower's actions would give rise to a good or bad followership. To make these concepts operational, the researchers proposed more or less different models.

Method
The comparison, in part, of Edith Luc's models for shared leadership and Kelley's followership model seems relevant to me because they both aim to develop leadership among employees. The behaviors to adopt to develop one's leadership or follow-up are very similar or even identical. Thus, everyone knows the importance of networking, collaborative to propose new direction, to be able to autonomy and initiative for oneself and the others, to be interested in the global project of the company to have a vision more broadened than its simple workstation, understanding the realities of others to foster teamwork, take its share of accountability, know how to communicate...
Both pursue goals and objectives that they participate in developing and finally, commitment to the task, the common goal and to the leader for the follower and the commitment to the task, the common goal and the team for the other.
We also know that in both cases leadership is deployed through the voluntary action of the individual, through commitment to action.
In both models, it is a question of reinforcing one's leadership by increasing one's own knowledge through the exchange with the members of one's team or by collaborating with experts.
At this stage we cannot decide that the similarities are important between the two types of leadership.
So, one could argue that shared leadership is a follower and is rather shared followership.
Leader and follower studies are placed in individual perspectives, while those on shared leadership consider leadership as a collective. The influence that is an essential component of the leader ship is easily understood in the leader-follower relationship, it is an individual and bidirectional influence it is about.
It remains more enigmatic in the shared leadership; do we speak of an influence of one part of the collective on the other part or of an alternation of individual mutual influence? In the first case, it refers to the theories of group dynamics, the informational and normative influences that bring conformism in general and innovation in particular. In the second case, we find ourselves in the type of leadership described in the vertical leadership relationship. The model presented by E. Luc uses, actually manipulates the dynamics at play in the leadership groups that it proposes. Thus, the very structuring framework that it sets up in the five successive levels makes it possible to mitigate the setting up group compliance. Its setting can be similar to the particular case of brain storming and the influence of a consistent and constant minority, favoring novelty. These mechanisms are particularly well described by social psychology in theories of social influence and the study of group dynamics, and in particular the polarization effect of groups. It is an initially dominant accentuation in a set of groups, in other words, if there is a stake for oneself or for one's group, the decision taken towards one of the poles the most extreme. From this, it might be interesting to study whether polarization is the result of the sharing or influence of a leader?
However, intuitively, it seems to me that in the model of shared leadership it is a follower-style leadership that unfolds rather than a leader, even though within the group we all adopt roles of follower and leader. Indeed, I think that the vertical axis is always present in debates and decision-making as the "applicant for a task to be realized".
In doing so, the follow-up of each member of the group towards the organization and its leaders must be positively affected. This structuring and structured group work strengthens group membership. For example, I worked for 20 years in a company and for 15 years at a good geographical distance from my management.
For at least 6 years the base of my work team is made up of the same people. We work in coaction, as soon as a questioning a little complex concerns one or the other we work together in search of adequate and positive solutions. I know now that we are exemplary and courageous followers (taking charge of the internal organization, relations partners, proposals of action...), our hierarchy intervening only for problems of premises. This way of working together gives us a working comfort that each expresses.
Strong of this observation, we decide to continue together as soon as the company will close the retirement of the leader, in continuity of the projects that we already put in place. And since then, this spontaneous coaction is crumbling. I understand from this situation, in the light of my problematic, that we have lost our common vertical axis (employee status, hierarchy and common objectives of professionalism) which made us exemplary followers able to forget our interests and motivations to benefit of the organization. The current situation makes us develop individual strategies not always compatible between them coming to interfere in our effective coaction. Professional identity (perception of oneself at work, the way one has to embody one's profession...) is at stake in this situation, especially in terms of status, going from followers to collectively.
Another example which seems to me to go in this direction and which also appeals to the notion of construction of the professional identity. I asked this question of the elimination of followership by shared leadership to a regional executive of a company that deals with anticipating the needs of communities and making certain bids for them. Thus, he explains to me that it is a very present subject in the company and that the work in collegiality is strongly recommended within the teams. He himself participates in a think tank on management in collegiality for the teams of the company, accompanied by management consultant. For him, collegiality is only a myth, it brings more consensus than new idea and that it is still an additional management method and that it is in any case the people with a strong leadership which l always wins; as proof of this, he points to the influence he exerts on the think-tank and on the consultant, who follow him in almost everything. Moreover, it is someone who has mounted the hierarchical marches thanks to effective results (objectives always exceeded), a listening capacity developed and certain humanity in its relations.
It seems to me that in this situation, his professional identity is very much attached to his leadership ability, a situation that prevents him from participating fully in collegiate working groups, because he defines himself first as a leader with excellent results before being someone who leads his team towards the best possible performance. Thus, it seems that it is the ability to follow that allows true coaction in the groups. So, I will talk more about shared followership than leadership in coaction, even though the term follower has little social desirability in our cultures.
That said, we must not oppose individual leadership, shared and follower, beautiful collective achievements have emerged through the complementarity, interdependence and interaction of these different components of social influence at play in our societies as the creation of social security in the post-war period or the revitalization of a territory abandoned by industry.

Obstacles and Limit of the Method
Shared leadership is first established within a team and, first, through the leader of this team. According to the teams, their composition and degree of maturity, the implementation of shared leadership can be confronted with varying challenges. For example, while all may recognize the need for greater collective intelligence and leadership, there may be a lack of basic trust or a common mission or common purpose. Not supported by all. Some members may have negative dynamics, which may affect the climate of trust needed. For example: The retention by some members of the information necessary to understand the nature of the challenge to be faced together (financial statements, for example); personal motivations to extend personal power and dominate the group; attempts to manipulate the line manager who finds himself insecure about his function; latent interpersonal conflicts and significant dissension among some team members.
In order to overcome these obstacles, the line manager can play an important role if he is involved. As for the group, he must learn to face these types of problems, to really discuss the mission and the common goal as well as to be honest about it. Challenges and conflicts. It must therefore have a code of collaboration and a process for resolving conflicts and differences.
This model envisions leadership as both collective and shared, but also considers it individually, as everyone on the team develops and updates their own leadership. Forms of individual leadership therefore continue to act within a group. Working as a team of this type. It seems that many types of leadership are involved in shared leadership.
One at the level of the team which concerns the task to be carried out and whose target would be this same collective and the external environment to this team concerned by the goal to be reached. The other at the individual level that would remain in the traditional perspectives of leadership.
In the literature on shared leadership in general, and this model in particular everyone is peer of the other, collaborator and no mention is made about the notion of follower.
What are the dynamic processes structuring the collective work that is shared leadership. Lise -The importance of proximity and common working time.
2) The relational structuring of the coaction A group of people exists through a relational configuration where affective elements bind these people in a particular way, these participants to model the dynamics of the coaction.
3) The identity structuring (refers to the construction of the professional identity) of each of the actors in the coaction influences the propensity to work together.
The second model, psychosocial approach, concerns the dynamics that are played out in this coaction.
For the authors this dynamic of coaction includes 4 components: the grouping of the individuals, the common objects, the coaction and the results. "The dynamics of the coaction refers to the play of forces that live the actors when they are in close interaction with each other with regard to one or more common objects of action". Also very interesting, the development of this model does not seem to bring me additional elements.

The Typology of Followership according to Robert Kelley
Robert Kelley uses a two-dimensional followership model to illustrate five types of followers that stand out on a frame with an axis measuring the critical thinking of the follower (dependent or independent) and an axis measuring his engagement level (active or passive).

Figure 1. Adapted from Kelley, 1998
For Kelley, commitment will be reflected by the follower's degree of activity. For example, an active follower will take initiatives. Independent and critical thinking refers to the follower's degree of independence from the organization and the leader (Kelley, 1992). This typology creates five types of followers through which the follower moves according to the situations.
The crossing of the two axes forms four types of followers: sheep, Insane, Conformists and Model. To this, Kelley adds the pragmatists who will never be the first to follow the leader: they will observe others to determine if it is worthwhile to change. In short, they are enthusiasts of the status quo. Sheep are passive followers, they only do what they are told to do and accept everything the leader says, they expect the leader to motivate them and think for them. The conformists are followers of very positive nature. When the leader has given them a vision and direction, they execute this request and then return to the leader for further instructions. Unlike the two previous types, the Insane or Lunatics think for themselves. However, they are skeptical and cynical followers who do not use their energy positively.
They hold their head to their leader and perceive themselves as snipers.
In 1998 The effective follower therefore builds his motives in his perception of his own role as a follower. He internalizes his motivation which avoids him avoiding consuming his energy.
Exemplary followers are followers that interest organizations. They have a role that requires a lot of the same characteristics of leadership. He is a critical thinker and assumes the risks. He knows how to challenge decisions and does not require constant leadership; What are the elements that determine this process of exemplary followership? Several dimensions are involved in the followership process: -The quality of the relationship between the leader and the follower. It is characterized by trust, respect and bi-directional influence and good communication.
-The structure of the organization, of the hierarchy: the more there is proximity with the hierarchy plus followership emerges.
-Organizational cultures allowing taking initiative and risk taking.
-Organizational characteristics such as the atmosphere at work (the relationship with the team or colleagues), rewards, recognition, type of work and working conditions.
-The personal characteristics of followers such as self-concept, personality, temperament and values.
The concept of the self refers to the knowledge and perception of an individual and to the characteristics and qualities that that individual attributes to him.
The temperament can be translated by the type of communication adopted: pragmatic or abstract and utilitarian or socially acceptable (communication with "forms" or not).
Values are for a majority of authors at the base of followership and notament of integrity.
There are other important authors and models that attempt to describe the behavior of followers using other dimensions such as Chaleff (2003) and Kellerman (2008) that complement and enrich Kelley's model, but they do not provide any evidence. Important fundamentals for our question.

Shared Leadership
Intimately linked to team management, leadership has been of great interest to organizations and researchers. Often considered top-down, leadership refers to the influence exercised by the leader of a team designated by management on team members in a unidirectional way in order to achieve the  Halpin, 2006;Small & Rentsch, 2010). This form of leadership, which is more vertical, is above all a "process of influencing others to make them understand and agree on what to do and how to do it; facilitating individual and collective efforts to achieve common goals" (Yukl, 2010 Shared leadership is characterized as a dynamic, a process of reciprocal influence among the individuals in a group for whom the goal is to guide the group or organization goals. This process of influence most often involves the peers, thus a lateral influence, and sometimes an upward and downward influence. The main difference between shared leadership and more individualized approaches is that the influence process is not just about downward influence on subordinates by an elected leader (see Pearce & Sims, 2000, 2002, but rather is distributed among all individuals instead of being in the hands of a single individual acting as superior (Pearce & Conger, 2003, p. 1). Thus, shared leadership is defined by its relational dimension and the fact that its distribution is dependent on social interactions and networks of influence (Fletcher & Kaufer, 2003, p. 21). For these authors, shared leadership leads to three changes in leadership theory: 1) It is distributed and interdependent; 2) It is part of social interactions; 3) Leadership is considered as knowledge and it is collective (Fletcher & Kaufer, 2003, p. 24).
I will add another definition and criticism that can enlighten our subject. it is that of Pearce, Yoo and Alavi (2004) evoke, for their part, the mutual influence (mutual influence) that the members of a team exert in a reciprocal way. The process of influence, according to them, is marked by a successive appearance of leaders (designated or non-formal). This successive emergence is conditioned momentarily by the skills and knowledge available to an individual that are essential to the team's performance (Pearce et al., 2004). This means that leadership is not practiced by all members at the same time, but rather by one person at a time. The latter emerges as part of the team, exerts his/her leadership to finally slip away for the benefit of a person whose skills will meet the needs and requirements of the moment (Pearce et al., 2004). This approach has been the subject of a relevant critique by Doucet and Sweeny (2010, p. 150) that "it is closer to the traditional perspectives of For her, shared leadership is: -The pooling of resources and leadership of each to achieve a common goal; -A process of reciprocal, multilateral and co-empowering influence is to guide one another, to influence for the sake of a community; -Strengthened collective power, expanded partnership, and clear accountability; -To dialogue together and dare to act in order to meet common challenges.
She sees shared leadership as a complement to vertical leadership but it is not a substitute for all decision-making.
It presents the setting up of a shared leadership as a multifactorial process that is reached in successive phases. There are five levels of maturity of dialogue, skills to develop and a style of leadership adapted to each level Indeed, it differentiates the communications centered on the relation between the individuals of the group and the communication centered on the goal to be reached in five levels. The first 3 have communication access on the relationship and do not participate in shared leadership.
-Level 1 conformist: the team has autocratic leadership and control, in this type of group it is to obey, execute, control and control. To progress to the next level, participants must learn to assert themselves in all situations, to trust each other and to know each other. -Level 2 Competitive: the team evolves towards a competitive mode with dominating-competitive leadership, in this group it is to convince, to be right, to dominate, to win or even to blame. To evolve to the next level the participants must be interested in others (develop their empathy), know and understand them, and learn to communicate clearly.
-Level 3 charismatic/charming: the team evolves with a charismatic leadership, in this group it is now a question of pleasing, charming, impressing, and interesting. To move to the next level, employees need to learn to cooperate with others, focus on the task and challenges, and solve problems.
The last two levels are concerned with shared leadership because the communications are mainly oriented towards the goal to be reached.
-Level 4 solver/cooperative: at this stage of evolution, leadership is shared and it is about listening, understanding, solving. The next level allows shared leadership to be the most effective; it is the last degree of maturity of this process. To achieve this, we must learn to anticipate the impacts, to plan scenarios with respect to the common goal to be achieved, to integrate various current and future perspectives, to rally.
-Level 5: gatherer/integrator. Leadership is shared. Now we have to bring people together and integrate viewpoints.
In the dynamic process of shared leadership practice, Edith Luc sees the possibility of a T-learning that she defines as integration and understanding of multiple perspectives: expertise and control (vertical axis) and systemic thinking. In traditional teams, members contribute to the discussions based primarily on their respective responsibilities (e.g., human resources, purchasing, finance, operations, communications, etc.). In the exercise of shared leadership, the boundaries between each of them disappear to make room for the emergence of collective intelligence in the service of the goal pursued.
Thus, everyone must understand and integrate tasks, the problem of others... (vertical axis) to integrate them into a more strategic systemic thinking.
It translates this approach into "more I understand and the more I can understand", "the more I master and the more I can control" and "the more I can dare to act, dare to say and influence". These effects allow everyone to strengthen and update their own leadership. Shared leadership is not a leadership mode to let go (in reference to the theory of Kurt Lewin, Lippit & White).
The leader in shared mode: 1) Exercise leadership with others.
2) Growing strength of the team and collective intelligence.
3) Openly share the information needed to understand the common challenge.

Discussion
From the collected elements, I will seek to clarify the problem from a theoretical point of view and from a more clinical and field perspective from some examples taken from companies and communities.
The comparison of the elements explaining the concepts of followership and leadership shows a great similarity between the characteristics of each in terms of behavior, structuring elements and ways of developing them.
The real difference and novelty comes from the collective aspect of this shared leadership, in the other theories the structuring elements are in an individual perspective and more easily comparable.
On this point, followership theories clearly fit into one dimension of the asymmetric two-way link between a leader and a follower and in a vertical hierarchical perspective while those on shared leadership are based on a horizontal peer relationship, complementary to a vertical axis of leadership.
On the other hand, writings on shared leadership do not mention follow-up except in an evolutionist perspective, in which man has always practiced this kind of leadership, spontaneously in situations where adaptation was necessary (war, disagreement between clans, natural disasters). Moreover, these