promising value when considering the team as a source of leadership and that shared leadership has an
impact on environment-oriented team effectiveness. The latter finding is especially interesting in the
light of the societal trends, where organizations need to tailor their leadership endeavours much more
to what happens outside of the organization.
Moreover, this model has proven to be useful in providing insight on the leadership behaviors
manifested across organizational levels (De Meuse et al., 2011). Transformational leadership is
displayed at all organizational levels. As for strategic leadership, top-level managers are most
prominent in these behaviors, which is in line with the argument that strategic leadership is the
privilege of top-level managers. Following the same line of reasoning, middle managers are more
prominent than lower-level managers in exploration-oriented strategic leadership behaviors, Business
development and Organizational creativity. This was however not the case for the exploitation-
oriented strategic leadership behaviors, Operational efficiency and Client centricity. Middle managers
were least prominent in the display of the latter behaviors (when compared to top-level and lower-
level managers).
Next to adding descriptive insights on the concept and distinctiveness of strategic leadership, this
dissertation also provided prescriptive value in terms of showing which leadership behaviors are most
effective at different organizational levels (LQWHUPVRIVXERUGLQDWH¶MREsatisfaction). The findings
from the first application study showed that different behaviors were considered less or more desirable
ZKHQFRQVLGHULQJVXERUGLQDWH¶MREVDWLVIDFWLRQ. MiGGOHPDQDJHUV¶MREVDWLVIDFWLRQZDs significantly
related to the Visionary and Operational efficiency behaviors of their respective supervisors.
Surprisingly, lower-level PDQDJHUV¶MREVDWLVIDFWLRQZDVXQUHODWHGWRWKHOHDGHUVKLSEHKDYLRUVRUWKHLU
respective supervisors, which may be due to the role stress of middle managers, required to fulfil both
a strategic and supervisory leadership role. Non-PDQDJHUHPSOR\HHV¶MREVDWLVIDFWLRQZDs significantly
related to the Intellectual stimulation, Organizational creativity and Business development behaviors
of their respective supervisor.
The second application study showed that shared strategic leadership was significant in predicting
environment-oriented team effectiveness. Vertical strategic leadership was unrelated to team
effectiveness. In general, shared strategic leadership was a more important predictor for team
effectiveness than vertical strategic leadership.