Leadership Structure and Style Conjointly Affect Team Adaptive Performance: Experimental Evidence

Teams must adapt to shifting task demands. Drawing on contingency and adaptive leadership theories, we tested two configurational pathways (additive complementarity and interactive synergy) linking leadership structure and style to team adaptive performance. In a longitudinal laboratory experiment, 80 four-person teams were randomly assigned to a 2 (shared vs. centralized) × 2 (empowering vs. directive) design and completed seven firefighting scenarios, facing a complexity change halfway through the experiment. Empowering leadership improved post-change recovery; shared leadership showed a parallel marginal effect. Their combination outperformed all other configurations. Findings support an additive complementarity pathway, through which leadership configurations drive team adaptation.