Leadership is the process of influencing employees to work toward the achievement of objectives. The essence of leadership in organizations is influencing and facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish objectives. A managers’ leadership behavior affects employees’ behavior, human relations, and their happiness, as well as job performance.

Clearly, leadership affects company success. Therefore, organizations recruit for and spend millions of dollars to develop employee leadership skills. The trend today is away from the old-school autocratic leadership to participative or shared leadership.

It is called shared leadership because the leader shares influence and joint decision making through participation by employees in management activities. Shared leadership is a simultaneous, ongoing, mutual influence process by both official and unofficial leaders. All leadership is shared, it is simply a matter of the degree of participation in each situation.