Shared and collective leadership scholarship has compellingly challenged heroic models by locating leadership in relational, plural, and distributed influence processes, rotating roles, and participatory design. Yet, the egalitarian impetus of “leading together” often falters in practice. Building on a scenario of an intentionally inclusive, collaboratively led conference that nonetheless stratifies participation and influence, this paper argues that shared leadership research has insufficiently theorized the intersectional and multi-level inequalities through which horizontal influence is enacted: sharing unfolds on uneven terrains . We develop a conceptual sensitizing repertoire that links shared and collective leadership to organizational inequality regimes and their mundane reproduction, to societal resource asymmetries that shape participation capacity, to cultural marginalization that filters legitimacy and recognition. Specifically, we emphasize decolonial feminist theory by explaining “subalternity” as a conceptual resource. In doing so, we suggest a societal turn in leadership studies that examines how shared leadership practices interact with broader economic, cultural, and epistemic inequalities, and we outline implications for research, theorizing, and methodology, as well as for practice.
Friedrich et al. (Mon,) studied this question.