<p>Current organizations often operate within top-down structures, in which formal leaders play crucial roles in leadership development, cognitive shaping, and guidance under high-innovation contexts. However, a key challenge in shared leadership literature is the limited understanding of how formal leaders and team members jointly shape shared leadership patterns with varying degrees of distribution and distribution structures. This gap obscures the mechanisms linking these patterns to team creativity. We address this by conceptualizing and operationalizing shared leadership patterns, encompassing both continuous patterns (i.e., decentralization) and categorical patterns (i.e., four leadership configurations). An exploratory study of 87 knowledge teams utilized social network analysis and two-step cluster analysis to identify continuous and categorical shared leadership patterns. A second study of 81 project teams examined mechanisms linking these patterns to team creativity. Results indicated that both patterns influence team creativity through team knowledge sharing, team cognitive diversity, and team harmonious innovation passion, with visionary leadership behavior demonstrating a mediated moderating role. This study not only highlights the theoretical and practical implications but also proposes several directions for future research.</p>