The effect of distributed and rotating leadership on collaborative innovation performance

Increasingly more firms engage in collaborations with other firms aiming at increasing their innovation performance. When engaging in such collaborations, proper coordination is important in order to reach collaboration objectives. An important concept within coordination is leadership. This study examines the effect of distributed and rotating leadership as parts of transformational leadership on collaborative innovation performance in an experimental setting. The results show that distributed leadership has a negative effect collaborative innovation performance, while rotating leadership has a positive effect on collaborative innovation performance. The results of this experiment can be seen as a guideline for firms that are engaging in collaborations, when looking for an effective management structure within collaborations.