Leadership In Virtual Teams Research Articles

Virtual team leadership and implementation in the US Air Force

One approach to transformation is the use of virtual teams. This qualitative phenomenological study employed a random sampling technique of a United States Air Force (USAF) virtual team for the study's population. Interviews uncovered insights and perceptions of team members as related to the operation, leadership, and collaboration of a virtual team in the USAF. Data revealed 15 themes that may enhance virtual team operation. Virtual teams need a defined purpose and charter to maximise effectiveness. Additionally, virtual teams present unique leadership challenges including having a clearly designated leader, the leader serving as a facilitator, and choosing the appropriate leadership style. Finally, virtual teams provide an avenue to enhance collaboration, but require the proper tools to promote information sharing.

Optimising virtual team leadership in Global Software Development

The globalisation of the software development industry has solved one set of problems and created a new set. Skills shortages in the host organisation can be solved by Global Software Development, yet the effective management of virtual teams is a new challenge. This study proposes a process reference model (PRM) and assessment model for the leadership of project teams, including complex virtual teams. Using modelling techniques from Software Engineering, the Leadership PRM describes the attributes that a project manager should possess, and the activities they should perform if they are to be perceived by those around them as leaders. The developed model contains the essential leadership characteristics. Leadership is difficult to define since it is situationally expressed. The context determines the outward form that leadership takes in a given situation. A manager who innately embodies these essential leadership qualities will be perceived as a leader by those around them. Leadership is a skill that can be learned and developed over time to a higher level of competence. Managers coordinate the activities of team members in the pursuit of goals, while leaders extend this management capability by knowing how to motivate team members to want to do what it is the leader wants them to do.

Virtual teams challenging human and technical Web 2.0 dimensions

Our article responds to the need of a system to build virtual teams that are active in virtual design projects in the area of new product development (NPD). It focuses on a methodology to provide an Aided Virtual Team Building System (Aided VTB System). Requirements of this Aided VTB System are defined and the fulfilment of their demand by appropriate, relevant and recent techniques as solutions that are discussed with help of an enquiry of 34 virtual team leaders. Based on the house of quality, one of the outcomes of the Aided VTB System is to provide recommendations, guidelines and even best practices for virtual teams building.

Optimizing Engineering Project Governance for Sustainability

Organisations are increasingly leveraging improved decision making processes during the establishment of project teams. Beyond the obvious advantages of accessing qualified, cost-effective project staff, the issues of sustainability and governance are addressed when the virtual teaming approach is used. Projects can proceed without people needing to travel to a co-located work-place, thus saving time, effort and expense while creating less environmental pollution. But there is a governance problem; running virtual projects, particularly complex projects involve a greater degree of difficulty than managing co-located projects. What is needed are effective, practical methods for managing virtual projects. This paper introduces a new Reference Model of Organisational Behavior (RMOB) for the Leadership of Complex Virtual Teams which is arguably an effective way to meet the challenges of virtual teaming. This paper also discusses the new issue of sustainable leadership with mention of the proposed Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Management indicators that point towards sustainable governance.

Managing emergent knowledge through deferred action design principles

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to examine empirically the relevance of the theory of deferred action for knowledge management systems (KMS) design in practice.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts a case study approach to examine knowledge work and knowledge management in virtual teamwork in a large UK telecommunications company to understand the occurrence of emergent knowledge and how it is managed by virtual team leaders. The section in the company studied is described as a “knowledge intensive organization” dealing with the company's e‐commerce activities.FindingsThe analysis confirms the complex adaptive system hypothesis – a complex system adapts to its environment through self‐organization. The data reveal the behaviour of the virtual team to be self‐organizing and adaptive to its environment. It confirms the knowledge tacitness hypothesis and social embeddedness of knowledge hypothesis as important determinants of knowledge sharing. Specifically, the data reveal the main issues concerning knowledge sharing practices of virtual team workers and the crucial team leader's role in the effectiveness of the teams' capability to develop social links to externalise and share tacit knowledge to accomplish tasks.Research limitations/implicationsIn this paper, the authors contribute “emergent knowledge” as a third category of organizational knowledge in addition to the existing tacit and explicit knowledge that needs to be considered when designing KMS. It also derives socio‐technical systems design principles based on the theory of deferred action, and a tentative development process with metrics is then proposed for KMS design that caters for emergent, tacit, and explicit knowledge.Practical implicationsExisting models such as the SECI model do not acknowledge emergent knowledge or its conversion into explicit knowledge. The theory of deferred action is invoked to derive design principles, termed deferred systems design principles, to depict how explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, and emergent knowledge can be represented to design knowledge management systems for “emergent organizations”.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the limited research and lack of consideration of emergent knowledge as an integral part of organizational knowledge, especially in an era of emergent organizations.

Virtual Team Leadership: A Case Study in Christian Higher Education

This study focused on virtual team leadership in Christian higher education by exploring the viability and acceptability of leadership practices defined by Malhotra, Majchrzak, and Rosen (2007). They identified six leadership practices effective leaders use to overcome the unique challenges associated with virtual teams, including: (a) establishing and maintaining trust through the use of communication technology, (b) ensuring that distributed diversity is understood and appreciated, (c) managing virtual work-life cycle (meetings), (d) monitoring team progress using technology, (e) enhancing visibility of virtual members within the team and outside in the organization, and (f) enabling individual members of the virtual team to benefit from the team. Using a case study design, a qualitative in-depth interview was conducted with an exemplary virtual team leader to explore his views of the leader's role and effectiveness within a virtual team environment in Christian higher education. Analysis of the data found that the leadership practices were conceptually accepted and practically applied; thus, this study concludes that these leadership practices are both valid and accepted by this exemplary virtual team leader.

Evaluating leadership effectiveness in virtual teams through creativity and performance: a qualitative analysis of an experimental study

The paper evaluates how leadership style and feedback affect a leader’s effectiveness (measured through creativity and performance) in virtual teams. The findings indicate that virtual team members’ creativity is impacted by leadership style regardless of the type of feedback whereas overall performance is impacted by feedback style alone. The objective is to provide guidelines to the virtual team leaders for improving their effectiveness based on the specific goals of a particular project.

The dynamic of leadership, trust and conflict in virtual teams

Die Bedeutung virtueller Teams fur die Zusammenarbeit global vernetzter Organisationen wird seit langem diskutiert. Doch obwohl sich im Alltag der Unternehmen zeigt, dass diese neue Form der Arbeitsteilung besondere Herausforderungen an Manager und Teammitglieder stellt, werden wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse und Empfehlungen bisher nicht ausreichend in der Organisationspraxis umgesetzt. Dieser Artikel will zum Einen durch eine Darstellung der Herausforderungen und Chancen virtueller Teams, zum Anderen durch die Prasentation wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse sowohl Denkanstose liefern, als auch konkrete Empfehlungen fur die Umsetzung in der Praxis aufzeigen.

Building Trust and Cooperation through Technology Adaptation in Virtual Teams: Empirical Field Evidence1

This article reports findings of a study of how leaders of virtual information systems development teams improve team trust and cooperation by managing adaptation of information and communications tools. Results indicate how Theory X (command and control) and Theory Y (facilitate and support) styles of leadership enable and hinder effective outcomes.

The contingent effects of leadership on team collaboration in virtual teams

Decision-making in virtual teams creates challenges for leaders to structure team processes and provide task support. To help advance our knowledge of leadership in virtual teams, we explore the interaction effects between leadership styles and media richness on task cohesion and cooperative climate, which in turn influence team performance in decision-making tasks. Results from a laboratory study suggest that transactional leadership behaviors improve task cohesion of the team, whereas transformational leadership behaviors improve cooperative climate within the team which, in turn, improves task cohesion. However, these effects of leadership depend on media richness. Specifically, they occur only when media richness is low. Our results also suggest that task cohesion leads to group consensus and members’ satisfaction with the discussion, whereas cooperative climate improves discussion satisfaction and reduces time spent on the task.

Leadership in virtual teams: A comparison of transformational and transactional leaders

The effects of transactional and transformational leadership on groups in which people interact in a virtual manner were analyzed and specifically the level of satisfaction and perception of the style adopted were evaluated. Results indicated that a transformational style is more satisfying than a transactional style, and that a transformational leader is judged to be better than a transactional leader.

Participation and communication in virtual teams using representational avatars

AbstractThe study examined how quantitative formative assessment tools may be applied to virtual team communication and provide quality and progress metrics to virtual team leaders. Representational avatars benefit virtual team communication and productivity. Organizational leaders need measurement tools to assess avatar innovation and monitor progress in virtual teams. A goal of this research was to supply a suite of tools to evaluate the potential for avatars to improve as well as monitor and measure virtual team participation and communication. The virtual teams were composed of students (N= 97) at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in New Zealand and Uppsala University in Sweden. Students enrolled in the Intelligent Business Systems (IBS) course formed teams by country and were randomly assigned to a text‐only or avatar‐enriched communication format. Survey results indicated that text‐based teams were perceived as efficient but lacking in inspired participation. Avatar‐enriched teams noted frustration with software but rated their experience as enjoyable. No significant difference in communication quality between teams was indicated, but avatar‐enriched teams posted significantly more words on weekly logbooks than text‐based teams. Recommendations include a model for data disaggregation that may be of value to improve assessment, productivity, and administrative costs of technology‐enhanced virtual teams.

Predictors of the emergence of transformational leadership in virtual decision teams

This study examined the etiology of transformational leadership in virtual team contexts. First, we compared 127 members of virtual decision-making teams with 135 members of traditional face-to-face teams in terms of the relationship between aspects of personality and the emergence of transformational leadership. The type of communication media (face-to-face versus “pure” virtual) was found to interact with extraversion and emotional stability in the prediction of emerging transformational leadership. In line with prior findings, we showed how these personality characteristics were relevant to transformational leadership emergence in our face-to-face teams. However, they were largely unrelated to such leadership in the virtual team context. We also focused specifically on the virtual context by analyzing the content of team interactions. After accounting for the effect of degree of activity level, the linguistic quality in one's written communication was found to predict the emergence of transformational leadership in virtual teams.

Transformational leadership in context: Face-to-face and virtual teams

This experimental study examined transformational leadership in the context of traditional teams using face-to-face communication and virtual teams using computer-mediated communication. Thirty-nine leaders led both face-to-face and virtual teams. Repeated-measures analyses revealed similar mean levels of transformational leadership in both team types; however, leader rank order varied across team type. Post hoc analyses revealed that the most effective leaders where those who increased their transformational leadership in virtual teams. Furthermore, analyses at the team level revealed that the effect of transformational leadership on team performance was stronger in virtual than in face-to-face teams. Team-member ratings of transformational leadership were equally linked to project satisfaction in face-to-face and virtual teams. Considered as a whole, our results suggest that transformational leadership has a stronger effect in teams that use only computer-mediated communication, and that leaders who increase their transformational leadership behaviors in such teams achieve higher levels of team performance.

Virtual success: The keys to effectiveness in leading from a distance

AbstractAs virtual teams become more prevalent, organizations need to take a close look at how they can best ensure the success of these teams. Leaders of virtual teams, who must manage from a distance, face unique issues and challenges. A recent study sheds some light on how the leaders of virtual teams can enhance team performance.

Occurrence and Effects of Leader Delegation in Virtual Software Teams

Virtual teams are an important work structure in software development projects. However, little is known about what constitutes effective virtual software team leadership, in particular, the amount of leader delegation that is appropriate in a virtual software-development environment. This study investigates virtual software team leader delegation and explores the impact of delegation strategies on virtual team performance mediated by team motivation, team flexibility and team satisfaction with the team leader. This research is a report of a pilot study run on student teams carried out to refine and test the research constructs and research model for a larger study run in corporations. The study found that virtual team leaders delegate more to competent virtual teams and that such delegation is positively correlated with team member satisfaction with their leader and with team member motivation. Overall, the work provides important information for software-based organizations interested in developing virtual team leadership skills.

Managing Virtual Teams: Strategies for Team Leaders

Organizations' increasing use of virtual teams has emphasized the importance of effective virtual team leadership. Yet the distribution of team members complicates typical leader functions, such as supervision and support, which the leader must now perform through technology. In this article, we present 10 strategies for managing virtual teams, focusing on the role of technology and training. Our hope is that these strategies will inform designers and guide them in developing collaborative support tools and procedures for these tools and in designing training for the use of these tools.

Is it Me?: Virtual Team Leader Self-Attribution & Responsibility Bias

Is it Me?: Virtual Team Leader Self-Attribution & Responsibility Bias

Research Note—A Model of Conflict, Leadership, and Performance in Virtual Teams

Organizations in many different industries employ virtual teams in a variety of contexts, including research and development, customer support, software development, and product design. Many virtual teams are geographically and culturally dispersed in order to facilitate around-the-clock work and to allow the most qualified individuals to be assigned to a project team. As such dispersion increases, virtual teams tend to experience greater and more diverse conflict compared to co-located teams. Since the dynamics of virtual team leadership are not yet well understood, research that examines how team leaders alleviate threats to team cohesion and provide strategies for conflict resolution makes significant contributions to the literature. Our study uses a survey-based methodology to examine the perceptions of 159 virtual team members employed by a large U.S. telecommunications corporation and five Korean firms involved in construction, finance, business consulting, sales, and distribution. The study integrates the dynamic model of conflict in distributed teams with the behavioral complexity in leadership theory to investigate the roles that virtual team leaders must effectively employ to reduce various forms of virtual team conflict. Our findings indicate that communication technologies are effective in reducing task conflict; however, the team leader may also mitigate task conflict by assuming the role of monitor. Likewise, process conflict may be abated in the virtual team as the leader performs coordinator activities. An effective virtual team leader exhibits specific roles to manage different types of conflict and the leader's response to conflict plays an important part in virtual team success.

Overcoming impediments to virtual team effectiveness

AbstractThe term virtual team denotes an organizational team whose members rarely meet face to face but who nevertheless perform interdependent tasks in pursuit of collective goals. This article identifies the unique aspects of virtual teams that generate major barriers to their effectiveness, and suggests ways in which these may be either overcome or mitigated. A process‐oriented model of virtual team effectiveness is presented, identifying issues associated with the development of transactive memory systems, work engagement, and collective efficacy as major challenges to virtual team effectiveness. These issues are illustrated with reference to the experience of virtual teams within a minerals processing firm. Finally, the authors discuss aspects of virtual team leadership and team climate that may help overcome some of the potential process losses associated with virtual teamwork. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.