Sharing Leadership through Digital Collaborative Objects

This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of collaborative tools and objects in the emergence and support of shared leadership, which has been associated with positive team dy-namics and innovative outcomes. We draw on ideas from the recent discourse on viewing lead-ership as a practice that involves human actors and material or technological tools to provide the first analysis of the features of collaborative tools that can support shared leadership. We present our early findings and insights from a multiple case study of ten innovation teams in their interaction with a collaborative tool that is particularly designed for coordination. We suggest that collaborative tools can contribute to shared leadership through two facilitating fea-tures: shared problem space and shared visualisation. Through our findings, we highlight the role of collaborative tools in supporting teams in sharing leadership for the purpose of joint in-novation.