Distributed Leadership - Old Wine in New Bottles?

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the practical understanding of distributed leadership in knowledge intensive firms, and what characteristics within the organization that affect this process. During the last two decades the society has undergone a range of economic and social changes where companies have gradually shifted towards a more decentralized and horizontal organization, which emphasize the group of workers to cope and act autonomously within local emergencies. This has resulted in knowledge intensive firms relying more on self-managed teams which requires different types of leadership and has led to an increasing popularity in distributed leadership and a stronger belief in the teams' ability to organize the accomplishment of work in organizations. The research methodology is a qualitative study inspired mainly by hermeneutics and critical theory in which the empirical data is collected through semi-structured interviews. Through the research we found that distributed leadership looks different in practice compared to the theory as there are external factors affecting it which is not found in the literature. It could also be questioned whether the concept really is a new phenomenon or just another name for sharing responsibility and influence i.e. an old wine in new bottles.