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Virtual Leadership: An Important Leadership Context

Article  in  Industrial and Organizational Psychology · June 2014

DOI: 10.1111/iops.12129

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182
Virtual Leadership: An Important
Leadership Context
GORDON B. SCHMIDT
Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne
Inherent in the focal article of Lord and
Dinh (2014) is the idea that for leadership
context matters. Who is seen as a leader,
how effective a leader is perceived to be,
and how effective a leader actually is are
all questions whose answers vary by the
context in which leadership is taking place.
One context that has become particularly
vital is that of the virtual team, a team that
has members who potentially span differ-
ent organizations, time zones, geographic
locations, and cultures with technology
enabling communication and coordination
between members (Huang, Kahai, & Jes-
tice, 2010). Virtuality is a related concept,
which is the degree to which a team
exhibits those characteristics (Gibson &
Gibbs, 2006). A study by MCIWorldcom
(2001) found that for companies with 500 or
more employees, 61% of employees report-
ing having been on a virtual team now or
at some time in the past. A study in 2008,
meanwhile, projected an 80% usage of vir-
tual teams by companies with over 10,000
employees (i4cp, 2008). Virtual teams are
a major part of how work is done in the
world.
Correspondence concerning this article should be
addressed to Gordon B. Schmidt.
E-mail: schmidtg@ipfw.edu
Address: IPFW, OLS Neff 288D, Fort Wayne, IN
46805
G.B. Schmidt
With significant work being done in
virtual teams there is inherently created a
similar need for virtual leadership, those
leaders that are in charge of managing
virtual teams and virtual workers, helping
them to be as productive as possible.
Research has examined how leaders gen-
erally impact virtual team behaviors (e.g.,
Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Gajendran & Joshi,
2012; Huang et al., 2010; Purvanova &
Bono, 2009) as well as the general nature
of leadership in virtual environments,
termed ‘‘e-leadership’’ (Avolio & Kahai,
2003). Although this research base has
helped us to understand virtual leadership,
it is small compared to the amount of
research on virtual teams as a whole and
the prevalence rate of virtual teams in
modern organizations.
This commentary describes generally
some of the major differences found
between leadership in high virtuality teams
compared to face-to-face teams, highlight-
ing the significant impact of the virtual
team context. This has significant impli-
cations for all four principles discussed in
Lord and Dinh, as the perceptions of lead-
ers and actual leader effectiveness can be
significantly impacted by the virtual team
environment.
Principle 1 focuses on how leadership
is socially constructed and is influenced
Virtual leadership: An important leadership context
by multiple individuals. Virtual teams
offer a very different environment in
which this process plays out due to
different communication media used and
potentially different needs for leaders to
facilitate communication (Gajendran &
Joshi, 2012; Hart & McLeod, 2003) and
personal connections between team mem-
bers (Malhotra, Majchrzak, & Rosen, 2007;
Saphiere, 1996). The virtual team context
is a context that may have strong impact on
‘‘who leads,’’ ‘‘why they lead,’’ and ‘‘how
they lead’’ (Lord & Dinh, 2014).
Principle 2 is about the significant impact
of information processing on leadership.
Virtual teams impact this because they offer
different medium by which information is
primarily presented (e.g., e-mail, phone,
computer based programs) as well as
lack some traditional means by which
followers gain information face to face,
such as non verbal cues and tone of voice.
Different information sources will have
significant impacts on how the team and
the leader is perceived by team members.
In fact, leaders might be more central to
needed information exchange, with Hoch
and Kozlowski (2012) finding that leaders
providing relevant information to teams had
a stronger impact on team performance the
more virtuality the team had.
Principle 3 focuses on how the effects
of leaders are often indirect, as it is often
shown through the performance of follow-
ers that can happen over time. It is still
relatively unclear what leader behaviors
lead to successful follower performance
in a virtual team but existing work sug-
gests that those behaviors might not be the
same as those in face-to-face teams, with
behaviors facilitating leader–member com-
munication and member–member personal
connections having greater impact in virtual
environments (Gajendran & Joshi, 2012;
Malhotra et al., 2007; Saphiere, 1996).
The virtual team context is especially
relevant to Lord and Dinh’s Principle 4,
‘‘looking backward and looking forward
are quite different processes’’ as changing
technologies are and will be changing
the nature of virtual leadership. Leadership
183
research and theory has focused on looking
backward for understanding how leadership
works but virtual teams will often be using
new and different information technologies
that did not exist in the past. Online social
media is one area that potentially can
have a huge impact on how virtual leaders
communicate with a team and how team
members communicate with each other.
Also relevant is that the workforce of
the future is likely to be very different from
the workforce of the past. Computer-based
technologies that were new and difficult for
workers to understand in the past can be
technologies with which future generations
of workers have grown up and have great
comfort. In fact many new younger people
entering the workforce today are seen as
‘‘digital natives,’’ those who have grown
up with the computer and the Internet
and thus feel perfectly comfortable using
them as a major communication means
(Bennet, Maton, & Kervin, 2008). The past
is especially not as relevant in the virtual
team context due to the rapid changing of
technology.
Different Nature of Leadership
in Virtual Teams
The existing empirical work looking at
virtual leadership has found traditional
leadership factors often do not have
the same impact. Research by Goh and
Wasko (2012) looked at the impact of
leader member exchange (LMX) on member
performance in the online game EverQuest,
a multiplayer online computer game. They
found that LMX had no direct impact on
player performance, its impact was fully
mediated by the amount of resources a
leader gave to a particular player. So
LMX only had an impact on resource
allocation by leaders rather than actual
player performance. Research by Hoch and
Kozlowski (2012) that compared the impact
of hierarchical leadership types (LMX,
transformational leadership, and mentoring)
in teams that varied in virtuality found
that the impact of hierarchical leadership
types was attenuated by virtuality, with
184
the variables having less impact the more
virtual the team was. Gajendran and Joshi
(2012), meanwhile, found that although
LMX had a positive impact on member
influence in team decision making, the
effect was strengthened significantly by
communication frequency. A good LMX
relationship had a lessened impact when
the actual contact between the leader and
the follower was more infrequent. They
found this joint effect was strengthened as
team dispersion by geographic location and
time zones was greater. Communication
frequency between leader and follower is
a variable that often comes up as more
crucially important in the virtual team
environment.
The impact of transformational leader-
ship in virtual teams has received mixed
results. In the previously alluded to results
of Hoch and Kozlowski (2012), the impact
of transformational leadership on perfor-
mance was attenuated by the degree of
virtuality of the team, with teams higher in
virtuality less impacted by transformational
leadership. Research by Hambley, O’Neill,
and Kline (2007) manipulated whether a
virtual team had a transformational or trans-
actional leader and found no significant
different between the two groups. Research
by Purvanova and Bono (2009) found quite
different results. They had leaders lead both
a virtual team and a face-to-face team and
compared the impact transformational lead-
ership had on team performance. They
found, in contrast, that transformational
leadership behaviors had a greater impact
in virtual teams compared to face-to-face
teams.
Although these results seem to be in
conflict, there are two factors that help
explain the very different results. The first
is communication frequency. Purvanova
and Bono (2009) examined the count of
transformational leadership behaviors while
Hoch and Kozlowski (2012) examined over-
all perceptions of transformational leader-
ship. Purvanova and Bono (2009), thus, in
part are measuring the frequency of inter-
action between leader and follower. We
might think that perceived transformational
G.B. Schmidt
leadership is not as impactful in virtual
teams as the actual amount of transfor-
mational leadership behavior done by the
leader.
The second factor that may be having
an impact here is the communication medi-
ums used. Huang et al. (2010) examined the
impact of leaders’ transformational leader-
ship and transactional leadership behaviors
on task cohesion and perceptions of a coop-
erative climate. They found that media rich-
ness, the degree to which communication
technology used is an easy means to share
viewpoints and resolve differences (Daft
& Lengel, 1986), had a major impact on
the influence of transformational and trans-
actional leadership. When media richness
was low, transactional leadership behav-
iors improved task cohesion, and trans-
formational leadership behaviors improved
perceptions of a cooperative team climate.
However, when media richness was high,
transactional leadership and transforma-
tional leadership behaviors had no signifi-
cant impact. Thus, the technology and how
it facilitates team member communication
with each other seems to have a major
impact.
Communication frequency with a leader
is one factor significantly more important in
the virtual team environment. Making sure
communication systems are established and
well maintained is an often expressed rec-
ommendation for virtual teams (Malhotra
et al., 2007; Maruping & Agarwal, 2004).
Hoch and Kozlowski (2012) also found that
structural supports have a greater impact
on performance in virtual teams compared
to virtual teams. These structural supports
include the already mentioned communica-
tion as well as supplying relevant informa-
tion and having appropriate reward systems
(Bell & Kozlowski, 2002). Leaders that cre-
ate and sustain these structures for virtual
teams greatly help team performance.
One other area that is often discussed but
has received relatively little empirical exam-
ination is the value of leaders helping to
increase personal and informal interactions
between virtual team members. Qualitative
work by Malhotra et al. (2007) found that
Virtual leadership: An important leadership context
leaders in successful virtual teams encour-
aged team members to share personal sto-
ries. The personal stories were seen as a
means to better connect team members and
get to know each other informally, which
is potentially easier in face-to-face teams.
Saphiere (1996) found that, for global busi-
ness teams, more productive teams engaged
in more informal and personal ways com-
pared to less productive teams. Stronger
personal relationships are seen as one way
to make virtual teams more productive (Hart
& McLeod, 2003).
So the existing research base in virtual
leadership begins to suggest that virtual
leadership has some significant differences
from face-to-face leadership. As argued by
Lord and Dinh, the context of leadership
matters, with the virtual team environment
offering a new and salient environment
that we need to better understand in order
to more fully comprehend the nature of
modern day business.
Looking to the Future in Virtual
Leadership
As Lord and Dinh point out in their forth
principle, we often look to the past in
trying to predict the future despite the
fact the past represents only one possible
outcome and that the future may be very
different in nature. This can be seen in
how many of the existing articles on virtual
teams look at the nature of virtual teams
through the lens of how things work in face-
to-face formats. Virtual teams are looked
at as an ‘‘impoverished communication
environment’’ (Purvanova & Bono, 2009),
which is more confusing (Thompson &
Coovert, 2003) and can lead to feelings
of isolation (Maruping & Agarwal, 2004).
Although undoubtedly aspects of this are or
could be true in particular contexts, there
are two significant considerations from a
more future oriented perspective that need
to be taken into account by leaders.
The first is that significant technology
already exists that helps to connect people
together through information technology,
which could work to combat issues of
185
virtual teams having an ‘‘impoverished
communication environment’’ (Purvanova
& Bono, 2009). One major category
is online social media, Internet-based
applications that allow their users to create
and share a wide variety of content among
fellow users (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
This group of technology allows the sharing
online through computers or cell phones a
wide range of content such as documents,
pdfs, pictures, recorded or live video, audio
recordings, and diagrams. Multiple users of
the program Google Docs can work on a
shared document at once, making modifi-
cations and potentially conversing through
built-in chat functions. The live video
conferencing program Skype allows people
to contact each other worldwide, and the
program Google Hangouts allows up to
eight users to video conference together at
the same time. Second Life and other virtual
world programs allow dozens, hundreds,
or even thousands of users to interact in a
3D virtual world through the use of virtual
avatars. Facebook (2013) alone has 727
million daily active users. These sites are
a significant way in which people commu-
nicate with each other on a personal level.
These sites can be used to facilitate virtual
team communication processes.
One major means they could be ben-
eficial is in facilitating the personal and
social connections that are seen as crucial
to virtual team success (Hart & McLeod,
2003; Malhotra et al., 2007; Saphiere,
1996). Facebook, for one example, offers
an easy means of sending private messages
to others, public, or semi public messages
to groups, and primarily public general
information about a user through profile
information. This could help virtual team
members to passively see this information
through profiles as well as interact directly
through private messages. Virtual leaders
can helps these processes to happen by
encouraging communication through such
sites or internal organizational networks,
with companies such as IBM already hav-
ing robust internal social networking sites
(Stopfer & Gosling, 2013). Leaders can also
make themselves available to virtual team
186
members through these online social media
sites, which many virtual team members
are probably already using in their personal
lives. One recent study in fact found 60.1%
of participants were connected with at least
one co worker and 25.6% were connected
with their supervisor on a social media site
(Weidner, Wynne, & O’Brien, 2012). Thus,
in many cases there are existing links that
could in fact be leveraged.
Social media sites also can benefit teams
by providing online environments that are
high in media richness. Programs like Skype
and Second Life allow for individuals to
communicate in online environments with
live audio and video. Skype also offers
text base chat that can be used while
live video is streaming where additional
information and links can be shared. This
technology can offer rich environments with
which virtual teams can interact. It is worth
noting that this is just the current state
of the technology. As time progresses we
can expect these programs to be more
efficient and of greater quality. It is not
completely inconceivable that they may
someday provide environments not just
equal to but in fact superior to face-to-
face environments for interactions within
particular team contexts.
The last important consideration of the
future to consider is that the passage of
time will impact how workforces react to
being on a virtual team and using online
communication technologies. Although in
much of the early virtual team work (e.g.,
Avolio & Kahai, 2003; Bell & Kozlowski,
2002) we might think that virtual team
members may not have had significant
previous experiences with computers or
online communication technologies before
being on a virtual team, this is unlikely
to be the case in the future. The younger
generation of today are often seen as
‘‘digital natives’’ (Bennet et al., 2008)
who have grown up with computers
and the Internet. Thus, communicating
online through computers or cell phones is
unlikely to be something new and different
to them, rather it is something with which
they already have great experience. These
G.B. Schmidt
generational and experience differences
might have a significant impact on how
such future workers react to being on
virtual teams and using communication
technologies to interact with teammates.
This will impact how leaders use these
technologies within virtual teams and how
leaders can best facilitate communication
and coordination among team members.
Leaders will ultimately need to prepare for
the workforce of the future rather than the
workforce of 10 years ago. Our theories and
research of virtual teams should take that
into account.
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