Leadership and Teamwork in Collaborative Interior Design Processes

Collaborative interior design projects depend critically on effective leadership and teamwork to integrate diverse professional perspectives, technical constraints, and client needs into coherent spatial solutions. This article synthesises theoretical and empirical literature on leadership styles, team development, and collaborative practices within design contexts, and presents a qualitative study exploring how leadership and teamwork function in multidisciplinary interior design teams. Grounded in theories of distributed leadership, team cognition, design thinking, and socio-technical systems, the research employs a multiple-case, interpretive qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis from five interior design firms engaged in collaborative projects. Findings reveal that successful collaborative design relies on a fluid leadership model where leadership tasks are distributed across phases, psychological safety fosters creative risk-taking, boundary-spanning roles (e.g., lead designers, project managers) coordinate expertise, and structured communication rituals (charrettes, design reviews) align team cognition. Challenges include power imbalances between stakeholders, temporal pressures that compress design iteration, and difficulties integrating specialist technical knowledge early in the process. The study proposes a situationally adaptive leadership framework for interior design that prescribes leadership behaviours and team structures across project phases, and offers practical recommendations for educators, practitioners, and project clients to enhance collaborative outcomes. Implications for theory extend distributed leadership into design practice and suggest future research directions investigating digital collaboration tools and cross-cultural team dynamics. Keywords: leadership, teamwork, collaborative design, interior design, distributed leadership, team cognition, qualitative research