Social communication behaviors of virtual leaders

Abstract

More and more organizations are adapting the solution of e-teams - teams that can span distances and times to take on challenges that most local and global organizations must address. This experimental study examined leadership in the context of traditional teams using face-to-face communication and virtual teams using computer-mediated communication. The research question is which leadership functions are necessary to promote virtual team performance. A model, suggesting that leader communication behaviors mediate the relationship between "virtuality" and "team's outputs" will be presented, and a methodology to examine this model will be illustrated. The findings show that face-to-face team's output is partially superior to a virtual team's output, and that social communication behaviors of face-to-face leaders are positive than social communication behaviors of virtual leaders. Virtual team is a common way of working, and will expand in the future. Thus, the importance of the theoretical and practical implementation of the virtual leadership will be discussed. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.