Enabling Shared Leadership in Virtual Project Teams: A Practitioners' Guide

Many virtual project teams perform better when leadership is shared (rather than centralized with the formal team leader); however, team leaders are often neither prepared to identify shared leadership potential nor to actually share leadership responsibility. Based on a study of 96 globally dispersed software development teams we show that team leaders tend to underestimate the team members’ capacity to lead themselves. As a consequence, these leaders monopolize decision‐making authority and provide insufficient levels of autonomy for team members to tackle their tasks. Preventing the team members from unfolding their true potential, these leaders unconsciously jeopardize virtual team performance. Paradoxically, it is thus team leaders themselves hindering leadership effectiveness in virtual teams.     

Participation and communication in virtual teams using representational avatars

The 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.     

Agreeing to disagree? Explaining self–other disagreement on leadership behaviour

ABSTRACT

Leadership research tends to treat differences among ratings of the same leaders as measurement error. Our study makes such varying perceptions of leadership behaviour its main phenomenon of investigation. We conceptualize divergent leadership ratings based on the difference between managers’ self-ratings and team members’ assessments of leadership behaviour. Using data from three German public organizations on 51 teams and 190 leader–follower dyads, we find that divergent leadership ratings are a function of managers’ motivation, their use of managerial reflection routines, and team members’ personality. The findings point to the importance of using multisource feedback and developing managers’ self- and other-awareness.     

Narcissism and Empowerment: How Narcissism Influences the Trickle-Down Effects of Organizational Empowerment Climate on Performance

The present study proposes a trickle-down model of employee empowerment in which empowerment climate at the organization level is positively related to the empowering leadership of team leaders and ultimately to individual task performance. Importantly, we hypothesize that team leaders’ and members’ narcissism can respectively inhibit and enable the cross-level empowerment process by affecting the intended distribution of decision-making authority and resources between team leaders and members. The analysis of data from 834 team members of 189 teams in 46 organizations reveals that organizational empowerment climate is positively related to team leaders’ empowering leadership when they are less narcissistic. Empowering leadership is positively related to individual task performance when team members are highly narcissistic. Finally, we observe that the combination of less narcissistic leaders and more narcissistic members is a condition under which the indirect effect of organizational empowerment climate on individual task performance through empowering leadership is positive.     

Comparing traditional and virtual group forms: identity,communication and trust in naturally occurring project teams

This study compares three types of project teams in a global high-tech organization: traditional (co-located), virtual (completely distributed), and ‘semi-virtual’ or hybrid (containing both local and remote members). We use in-group/out-group theories of subgroups to help explain the findings. Specifically, local members of semi-virtual teams report much more positive perceptions of their local than their remote members, while traditional and virtual team members appear similar. We conclude by drawing implications for practice, such as the avoidance of semi-virtual teams whenever possible and the development of strong team identities.     

Can leadership compensate for deficient inclusiveness in global virtual teams?

Although the number of global virtual teams has been growing rapidly, it is still a great challenge to achieve internal collaboration across geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Two factors that have been identified to improve productivity are inclusive group attitudes in the team and the right leadership from the team leader. Although there are strong indications that each of these concepts would have a favourable effect on team member performance, we set out to explore how they function in combination. More specifically, we hypothesise that inspirational motivation from a team leader can compensate for a lack of inclusive group attitudes in the form of team openness to language diversity. We also predict the positive effects of “inspirational motivation” leadership to be stronger than those of the “management by exception” style of leadership. Using responses from 174 team members and their 23 team leaders in the research and development department of a Danish manufacturing organisation, we confirm our hypotheses. This provides clear guidelines for HRM interventions in organisations using global virtual teams.     

IT-enabled awareness and self-directed leadership behaviors in virtual teams

Despite the pervasiveness of self-managing virtual teams, organizations find it particularly challenging to motivate virtual team members to exhibit and manage their leadership behaviors. This study contributes to virtual team leadership literature by specifically shedding light on how distinct awareness forms enabled by information technology (IT) signal important cues to virtual team members to self-lead, that is, self-direct their leadership behavior in their team. Our results reveal that IT-enabled disclosure awareness is key to inducing several leadership behaviors: directive leadership, supportive leadership and interpersonal helping. Further, for directive leadership and interpersonal helping, the relationship is contingent on IT-enabled task knowledge and IT-enabled presence awareness. At low IT-enabled task knowledge awareness or high IT-enabled presence awareness, virtual team members who perceived IT-enabled disclosure awareness employed directive leadership and interpersonal helping. Opposite results were found at high perceived IT-enabled task knowledge awareness and low perceived IT-enabled presence awareness. This research highlights the critical role played by specific awareness forms enabled by IT in motivating virtual team members to engage in self-leadership.     

民营医院构建虚拟团队的可行性实证研究

人才问题是民营医院发展的瓶颈,随着虚拟团队理论的成熟,借鉴已有的远程诊疗技术的发展,民营医院可以考虑构建自己的虚拟团队,实现人才资源的共享。本文就民营医院构建虚拟团队的可行性进行了实证研究,通过对四个不同区域的民营医院的实际调查,分析不同类型的医疗成员对于民营医院构建虚拟团队的认识,得出民营医院构建虚拟团队是可行的,为民营医院管理者提供决策依据。     

Sink or Swim: Empowering Leadership and Overload in Teams' Ability to Deal with the Unexpected

The notion of improvisation has recently emerged in managerial studies as a viable solution to flexibly dealing with unexpected occurrences in work environments. However, past research on team improvisation has overlooked the contingencies that allow teams to effectively improvise. Drawing upon demand‐control theory, we investigate how empowering leadership and overload affect the improvisation‐performance relationship in the context of 48 work teams. Our results suggest that empowering leadership positively moderates the relationship between improvisation and performance, while overload attenuates the same relationship. Moreover, we found a joint effect of overload and empowering leadership influencing the improvisation‐performance link, such that improvisation is most positively related to performance when empowering leadership is high and overload is low. Conversely, we found that empowering leadership is particularly detrimental to the improvisation‐performance relationship when team members perceive high degrees of overload. Our findings make important contributions to the extant team literature as well as to the emerging literature on team improvisation. We outline several significant insights for HR managers and team leaders who are responsible for supporting teams that face unexpected events in the work environment. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Leadership and cooperation in growing teams

We study how the growth of teams affects leadership effectiveness and intragroup cooperation. We put experimental participants in two teams. In each team, the members voluntarily contribute to a club good. In one of the two teams, the members observe the contribution of a randomly chosen leader before they decide themselves. Two treatments allow for migration between the teams. In one of them, participants control access to their team with a voting process. By design, participants can achieve the efficient outcome only if they all move into one team. We compare the results with a leaderless setting as well as with four treatments which vary team size exogenously. The results show that high contributions of leaders encourage higher per-capita contributions of their followers which foster migration into their teams. In turn, larger teams experience even more courageous leadership and higher contributions, but the coordination effect diminishes. Nevertheless, the dismissal of potential newcomers in the treatment with voting suggests that team members see a trade-off between team size and contributions. They sacrifice economic benefits from potential entrants to maintain intrateam cooperation.     

Leader Emergence in Nascent Venture Teams: The Critical Roles of Individual Emotion Regulation and Team Emotions

This study advances a theory of how different aspects of emotion regulation influence individual leader emergence in the intensely emotional context of nascent venture teams. Despite the growing amount of research on the role of leadership in the entrepreneurial process, the emergence of leaders in nascent venture teams has rarely been explored. Drawing on theories and research on leadership emergence and emotion regulation, we argue that the two aspects of emotion regulation (i.e., reappraisal and suppression) exert opposite effects on the degree to which nascent venture team members come to perceive an individual as a leader. We also theorize that team emotions arising from affective events moderate the relationship between reappraisal and leader emergence in such teams. Data from 103 nascent venture teams without prior leaders show a negative relationship between individuals’ trait disposition to suppress emotions and their emergence as leaders, and a positive relationship between their trait disposition to reappraise emotions and their emergence as leaders. Moreover, we find that negative team emotions magnify the positive association between reappraisal and leader emergence, while positive team emotions mitigate it. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on entrepreneurial leadership, entrepreneurial emotions, and leadership in general.     

How to be an inclusive leader for gender-diverse teams

Gender inequity is globally present in the labor force and advocating for gender equality is not merely a fairness issue, but a benefit for organizations. In this paper, we identify common challenges for gender-diverse teams (i.e., turnover, discrimination, communication issues, conflict between team members, and low team cohesion). We also discuss the importance of inclusive leadership to overcome these challenges. Correspondingly, we provide practical actions for inclusive leaders to implement on their teams to address issues regarding diversity, and subsequently leverage its benefits.     

Project success and project team management: Evidence from capital projects in the process industries

Efficient project execution is a key business objective in many domains and particularly so for capital projects in the process industries, but existing project management research gives little direction about how project team factors influence three important capital project outcomes: cost, schedule, and operability. After an extensive cross-disciplinary review of the general team and project management literatures, we constructed and tested a theoretically based, five-dimensional model of organizational context, project team design, project team leadership, project team processes, and project outcome factors. We examined the model by means of an empirical study of 56 newly completed capital projects executed by 15 Fortune 500 companies in the process industries. The results indicate the value of disaggregating project outcomes for research purposes. Different bundles of project team factors were found to drive project cost, schedule, and operability. Project team efficacy, cross-functional project teams, autonomous project team structure, and virtual office usage were the strongest predictors of project cost effectiveness. Continuity of project leadership, cross-functional project teams, and project manager incentives were the strongest predictors of project construction schedule. In contrast, clear project goals and an office design to facilitate effective communication were the main predictors of plant operability. Implications of these findings for researchers and project practitioners are discussed. One major practical implication of our findings is that project managers need to clearly focus and prioritize their goals for each project so they can adopt the appropriate bundles of project team practices that will facilitate their goal achievement.     

Training for virtual teams: An investigation of current practices and future needs

Organizations are creating virtual teams at an ever‐faster rate. Virtual team leaders and members from distant locations work together and communicate with each other using a variety of information technologies. Results from a survey of 440 training and development professionals identify current organizational training practices aimed at preparing leaders and members for virtual team assignments. Comparing organizations with more effective and less effective virtual team training programs allowed us to identify a set of “best practices.” We offer practical guidance regarding the effective use of training to promote high‐quality virtual team performance. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Managers, leaders, and teams in a team-based environment

In order to succeed in today's dynamic environment, abundant with corporate restructuring and downsizing, into what must today's manager transform? Part of the answer lies in "leadership." Some managers are leaders, some leaders are managers, but the two are not synonymous. There are notable differences between managers and leaders, particularly in the role each plays in the transition towards organizations that are customer-focused, empowered, and team-based. The evolution towards team-based organizations begins with three different, concurrent transitions: of managers into leaders, of employees into teammates, and of functional hierarchical organizations into those of team empowerment.     

民营医院医疗虚拟团队整体的质量协调机制研究

医疗质量是民营医院的核心竞争力,受到虚拟团队分散性和动态性影响,民营医院医疗虚拟团队医疗质量协调管理是非常必要的。鉴于虚拟团队的动态性,本文构建了基于动态合约的质量协调管理机制,从医院与成员、医院评价小组与成员、团队管理者与成员等三个角度,分合作初、合作中、合作完成三个阶段,为民营医院医疗虚拟团队的质量协调管理提供一种较好的解决方案。     

Team personality composition,emergent leadership and shared leadership in virtual teams: A theoretical framework

Limited theory and research has been devoted to the role of team personality composition, as well as emergent and shared leadership, in virtual teams. In an effort to provide a theoretical basis for the role of team personality composition, as well as emergent and shared leadership, in virtual teams, we propose a virtual team framework that portrays the team personality composition as predictors of emergent and shared leadership. These in turn are expected to impact virtual team performance. We further posit that the relationships between team personality composition and virtual team performance are indirect, through emergent leadership and shared leadership. Finally, we present team virtuality as a moderator between team composition and team processes. Suggestions for future research and implications for the management of virtual teams are presented.     

The three Cs for cultivating organizational culture in a hybrid world

For years we have known that effective organizational culture is critical to ensuring revenue growth, employee retention, and even stock price acceleration. Yet, culture change is hard. Today, in the hybrid world, most employees still spend the majority of their time working within small work teams, but team members are often remote from one another. These employee interactions are essential to sharing and modeling the norms and behaviors necessary to cultivate the desired culture. Combining behavioral data with the use of organizational network analysis helps to overcome these limitations and provides a deeper understanding of the employee cultural experience—even in the hybrid context. In our research, we evaluated 10 attributes critical to an organization’s culture from more than 50,000 employees across three years. Using passive data, we also re-constructed the employee network based on primary interactions. Our research highlighted three critical cultural patterns that will help to more deeply evaluate culture in a hybrid context, but even more importantly,help target local solutions that can be quickly implemented. We call these the three“C’s” of cultivating culture. We show that organizational culture clusters in the employee network, is contagious among employees, and is contextually dependent.We discuss our key insights on the three C’s, concluding with practical applications for leaders applying these insights in their organization.     

The effects of high-involvement work systems and shared leadership on team creativity: A multilevel investigation

Understanding how to effectively stimulate creative potential in the workplace through strategic human resource management (HRM) practices is critical to enhancing organizational competitiveness. This study investigates the effects of high-involvement work systems (HIWS) on team creativity in terms of ability–motivation–opportunity theory and a team input–process–output model. It draws on a data set consisting of 668 employees from 112 teams in 41 organizations in China. The results reveal that HIWS are positively related to team creativity, not only directly, but also indirectly through a sequential mediating mechanism of involvement climate and shared leadership. We argue that when employees are placed in an autonomous work environment underpinned by HIWS, they will be more likely to be involved in creative activities and engage in mutual influence behaviors in their work teams, and lead each other to achieve a higher level of creativity. Our study extends the knowledge on strategic HRM/HIWS, shared leadership, and creativity.     

Job satisfaction in teams

This paper analyses and discusses the results of a large sample survey of job satisfaction among clerical employees working in teams. The relative strengths of association between several variables and job satisfaction are assessed and the results support the importance of on-the-job training, participation in decision making and management leadership. Questions are raised about first-line supervisors as team leaders.