Virtual Leadership: An Important Leadership Context

Transcription

1 182 G.B. Schmidt 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 different organizations, time zones, geographic locations, and cultures with technology enabling communication and coordination between members (Huang, Kahai, & Jestice, 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 reporting having been on a virtual team now or at some time in the past. A study in 2008, meanwhile, projected an 80% usage of virtual 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. schmidtg@ipfw.edu Address: IPFW, OLS Neff 288D, Fort Wayne, IN 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 generally 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, highlighting the significant impact of the virtual team context. This has significant implications for all four principles discussed in Lord and Dinh, as the perceptions of leaders 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

2 Virtual leadership: An important leadership context 183 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 members (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., , 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 followers 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 suggests that those behaviors might not be the same as those in face-to-face teams, with behaviors facilitating leader member communication 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 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

3 184 G.B. Schmidt 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 leadership in virtual teams has received mixed results. In the previously alluded to results of Hoch and Kozlowski (2012), the impact of transformational leadership on performance 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 transactional 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 leadership 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 overall perceptions of transformational leadership. Purvanova and Bono (2009), thus, in part are measuring the frequency of interaction between leader and follower. We might think that perceived transformational leadership is not as impactful in virtual teams as the actual amount of transformational leadership behavior done by the leader. The second factor that may be having an impact here is the communication mediums used. Huang et al. (2010) examined the impact of leaders transformational leadership and transactional leadership behaviors on task cohesion and perceptions of a cooperative climate. They found that media richness, 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 transactional leadership. When media richness was low, transactional leadership behaviors improved task cohesion, and transformational leadership behaviors improved perceptions of a cooperative team climate. However, when media richness was high, transactional leadership and transformational leadership behaviors had no significant 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 recommendation 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 communication as well as supplying relevant information and having appropriate reward systems (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002). Leaders that create and sustain these structures for virtual teams greatly help team performance. One other area that is often discussed but has received relatively little empirical examination 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

4 Virtual leadership: An important leadership context 185 leaders in successful virtual teams encouraged team members to share personal stories. 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 business teams, more productive teams engaged in more informal and personal ways compared 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 faceto-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 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 modifications 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 communicate with each other on a personal level. These sites can be used to facilitate virtual team communication processes. One major means they could be beneficial 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 having robust internal social networking sites (Stopfer & Gosling, 2013). Leaders can also make themselves available to virtual team

5 186 G.B. Schmidt 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-toface 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 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. References Avolio, B. J., & Kahai, S. S. (2003). Adding the E to e-leadership: How it may impact your leadership. Organizational Dynamics, 31, Bell, B. S., & Kozlowski, S. W. J. (2002). A typology of virtual teams: Implications for effective leadership. Group and Organization Management, 27, Bennet, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L. (2008). The digital natives debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5), Daft, R. L., & Lengel, R. H. (1986). Organization information requirements, media richness, and structural design. Management Science, 32, Facebook. (2013). Key facts. Palo Alto, CA: Author. Retrieved November 25, 2013, from newsroom.fb.com/key-facts. Gajendran, R. S., & Joshi, A. (2012). Innovation in globally distributed teams: The role of LMX, communication frequency, and member influence on team decisions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97, Gibson, C. B., & Gibbs, J. L. (2006). Unpacking the concept of virtuality: The effects of geographic dispersion, electronic dependence, dynamic structure, and national diversity on team innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 51, Goh, S., & Wasko, M. (2012). The effects of leader member exchange on member performance in virtual world teams. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 13, Hambley, L. A., O Neill, T. A., & Kline, T. J. B. (2007). Virtual team leadership: The effects of leadership style and communication medium on team interaction styles and outcomes. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Making Processes, 103, Hart, R. K., & McLeod, P. L. (2003). Rethinking team building in geographically dispersed teams: One message at a time. Organizational Dynamics, 31, Hoch, J. E., & Kozlowski, S. W. J. (2012, December 3). Leading virtual teams: Hierarchical leadership, structural supports, and shared team leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication.

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