Leading together, depleting apart: A moderated mediation model of shared leadership and creative service performance

Prior research on shared leadership has largely focused on its positive team-level outcomes, and overlooked the potential individual-level costs associated with engaging in such leadership structures. Drawing on ego-depletion theory, we introduce individual resource depletion as a key mediating mechanism to explain the potential negative effects of shared leadership on employees' creative service performance. Furthermore, we examine how this indirect relationship is moderated by individual network centrality, positing it as a first-stage moderator. To test our hypothesized multilevel model, we employed a time-lagged research design in which shared leadership and network centrality were assessed using a social network approach. The data comprised responses from 341 team members nested within 68 teams across service organizations in China. Multilevel analyses revealed that shared leadership indirectly impair individual creative service performance through its effect on resource depletion. Notably, individuals occupying central positions within team workflows experienced stronger negative effects of shared leadership on resource depletion. However, contrary to our prediction, the moderated mediation effect was not supported, that is, network centrality did not significantly amplify the indirect negative relationship between shared leadership and creative service performance via resource depletion.