The notion of shared or distributed leadership (Brown and Beech, 2000) sitscomfortably with recent developments among clinical professionals in healthcare. For example, both shared governance (Edmonstone, 2000) in acutehospital services and the creation of self-managed teams in community nursingservices (Baileff, 2000) both emphasise the significance of ``nearby’’ as opposedto ``distant’’ leaders ± the former being more typical of the transformationalapproach and the latter being more typical of the transactional approach(Shamir, 1995), as shown in more detail in Table II.