People:

• Suling Zhang
• Jerry Fjermestad

Description:

Globalization, inter-organizational alliances and the exponential development in communication technology facilitate the dispersion of work. Virtual teams begin to emerge as important work group structure and gain popularity in a number of organizations. Virtual teams offer a wide range of benefits for organizations but they also pose significant challenges. One such challenge is the ability of the organizational leadership to adapt to the new emerging work context. But there have been very limited research on virtual team leadership and have been restricted to the GSS context. Our study aims to address this gap through investigating what leadership behaviors are effective in virtual team context. We have made progress in conceptual development of virtual team leadership behavior theory. In the future, we plan to conduct experiments to test our propositions.

Publications:

Fjermestad, J., Kahai, S., and Zhang, S., Virtual Team Leadership: Beginnings and Directions, accepted by International Journal of e-Collaboration

Zhang, S., and Fjermestad, J., Bridging the Gap between Traditional Leadership Theories and Virtual Team Leadership, under review of Group Decision and Negotiation

Zhang, S., Fjermestad, J., and Tremaine, M. (2005), Leadership Styles in Virtual Team Context: Limitations, Solution and Proposition, the 2005, 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences