Abstract: What is it that enables some sport teams to outperform others? What makes some sport teams perennial champions and others perpetual runners up? Research suggests that leadership is one of the key factors that contributes to competitive advantage. However, developing and implementing a leadership structure that delivers the desired competitive advantage is far from straightforward. While leadership research so far has mainly focused on the role of the coach, equally important, although far less examined, is the role of leaders within the team – the athlete leaders. Our work over the past years revealed that a shared, rather than a vertical leadership structure has unique advantages for team effectiveness and team members’ health and well-being. Interestingly, it appears that athlete leaders were only able to generate this positive impact to the extent that they cultivated a shared social identity within the teams they lead. Drawing on these insights, we have developed a new leadership development program —the 5R Shared Leadership Program (5RS) —that (1) implements a structure of shared leadership (through Shared Leadership Mapping) and (2) further develops participants’ leadership potential (through the 5R’s of Readying, Reflecting, Representing, Realising, and Reporting). More specifically, being a close intertwinement of shared leadership theorising and the social identity approach to leadership, 5RS helps leaders in the team to create, embody, advance, and embed a collective sense of ‘us’ in their teams. In short, by providing means to develop and mobilise a sense of ‘us-ness’, 5RS gives leaders and their teams the tools to create the best possible version of ‘us’.

Bio: Prof. Katrien Fransen is Associate Professor in leadership and coaching at the Department of Movement Sciences at KU Leuven. Together with her team, she has set up a new research line on shared leadership, focusing on the identification and development of peer leaders in different settings. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in a wide variety of top-tier journals and is member of the editorial board of Psychology of Sport and Exercise and Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology. To translate her research findings to the field and to help teams implement an effective structure of shared leadership, she has established the expertise centre Leading Insights (www.leadinginsights.be/en).