Gedeeld leiderschap en proactiviteit in Het Nieuwe Werken

Increasingly, employees are experiencing so-called New Ways of Working (NWW), facilitated by advanced ICT. They must deal with more autonomy and responsibilities in combination with flexibility in time and location of work. It has been argued that NWW combine well with novel leadership styles, such as shared leadership, although this relationship has not been studied before. Similarly, the expected consequences of NWW on proactivity of employees and teams requires academic investigation. This paper reports on a study on the impact of NWW implementation on shared leadership and the proactivity within SNS REAAL (a large banking and insurance company in the Netherlands). The case study is particularly interesting since NWW employees (N = 51) are compared with non- NWW employees (N = 77). The results confirm that NWW have a positive, significant relationship with team proactivity behaviour. In addition, the implementation of NWW can have an indirect impact on the individual proactivity of employees, which is only effective if team proactivity is promoted. Merely implementing NWW will not result in shared leadership. The findings suggest that NWW characteristics, such as an open feedback culture, more autonomy, and internal entrepreneurship, are most effective in the pursuit of proactivity and shared leadership.