Explain Leadership in Virtual Teams at Management Essay

The idea of Virtual teams Leadership centers its attention on managing the teams, Reducing conflicts, Building trust, and cooperation within the team so that it can perform better and achieve more outcomes. In acquired literature researchers concluded different types of hypotheses which yield the required outcome from the team. Virtual Teams Leadership in Management Essay; The team’s mutual awareness can disrupt by removing the common factors like location, and culture between the team members”. The electronic interactions among team members may misunderstand and it is no surprise that team conflict is a pressing problem in virtual teams”. The studies found many types of leadership skills and approach toward team conflict to increase the trust and motivation between team members.

Here are the articles to explain, what is Leadership in Virtual Teams at Management Essay?

Virtual projects often include the collaboration of multiple organizations or employee-client relations through; which leaders lost the ability to influence the workers, and hence use information; and also communication tools to regain their lost influence for achieving better performance from the team. In some situations, teams will see emergent leadership skills; where the active team members will lead the teams according to the situation of the project or proposed work. There are different leadership behaviors proposed by various studies the main leadership skills exhibited by these team leaders will be transformational, transactional, and participative behaviors. Some of the studies proposed the success of the team is not only due to a team’s efforts but is collective individual influences the performance of the team. Also, The challenges of the virtual team settings can be overcome by enhancing the leader’s ability; which can achieve by the change in management principles.

Leadership in Virtual Teams;

A virtual team is a group of individuals who exist geographically dispersed, and cross-functional and work on highly interdependent and collaborative tasks. Virtual Team Building Activities; Leading these teams will need special leadership skills and practices, the authors like Rosen, Furst, & Blackburn did intense research and found nearly six types of leadership practices performed by virtual team leaders, which can elaborate mainly on establishing and maintaining trust through the use of communication technology, ensuring distributed diversity, managing working life cycle, monitoring teams progress, enhanced visibility, enabling virtual team members to benefit from collaborated teamwork.

For me leading virtual teams requires all the leadership and project management skills. The communication through electronically and in person is not the same, because the authors stated that the “Synchronizing efforts of geographically, culturally and the technically diverse team does not happen magically” and they stated that it’s hard to motivate and influence people electronically”.

Challenges faced by Virtual Teams;

The virtual teams have different and greater challenges than the traditional workplace environment; Also, The working lines will cross over geographic locations, boundaries, cultures, networks, and alliances. Since the virtual teams are very diverse, they have a very unique set of problems rather than collocated teams. “The virtual teams face the issues of trust, communication, goal alignment, shared purpose, skills, resource availability, and role clarity”. The virtual team has to overcome the following external and internal challenges.

External factors are outside the control of a virtual team; and the team has to find a way to manage them for example, distance, time, and technology. Internal factors are those that will be within the control of a virtual team; the team can directly influence or interact with these factors like culture, trust, communication, relationship, and leadership. Leadership is the key to any virtual organization setting, the right competencies, attributes, trust and rapport, and management of virtual workers and teams. Elective leadership is the key factor that influences success in a virtual organization.

The Maintenance of cultural identity, a brand of employment, and employee-manager satisfaction requires consistent and regular communication. Leadership skills are necessary for virtual work. According to O’Neill, Lewis, & Hambley, generally, leadership includes in virtual teams a strong focus on relationships, emotional intelligence, a track record and innovation, a focus on process and outcome, and the ability to give positive and constructive feedback. “In the virtual organizations, the role of leaders tends to shift from one of the controllers to one of coordinator or coach and organizations must promote trust and working relationships”.

Diversified Leadership Roles in Virtual Teams;

According to Chen, Yang, & Tsou, diversified leadership roles influences both leadership effectiveness and team trust. Some factors that influence the team’s effectiveness are team trust, propensity, and leadership effectiveness. The researchers also found that trust mediates the relationship between both leader and team effectiveness.

Synchronous ICT ( Information and Communication Technology) tools can be different in terms of social presence and information richness and text, audio, and video-conferencing systems are classified under these tools. From e-mails, discussion forms, and bulletin boards, to workflow, scheduling, and other project management applications the ICT tools vary in wide ranges. The success of the virtual teams is a clear purpose, goals always should be measurable; an appropriate number of individuals in the team, establishment of guidelines, communication, decision making, and processes.

The behavioral complexity theory stressed the importance of leaders in improving their team effectiveness through their diversified leadership roles. The roles of leadership categorize into three types they are, interpersonal contact, information processing, and decision making. The type of challenges such as ICT-enabled communications, cross-cultural communications, global logistical design, and technological complexity are more prevalent in virtual teams. “Diversified leadership roles, leadership effectiveness, and propensity to trust all positively influence team trust, in turn; will contribute to two types of indicators of team effectiveness, performance, and satisfaction”.

Building Trust and Cooperation;

Project managers are the key people for making their teams successful. When the group stood set virtually they go to face-to-face meetings using communication technology; but, these meetings will affect both cost and time for travel during the project. The researchers doubted in mind whether effective management of information and communication technology offers VT leaders to regain the lost control over influence and performance over their virtual or not. Here the researchers proposed a research model to find out how technology adaption will relate to building trust and cooperation in virtual teams.

The descriptive findings of the study suggest that it is important to adapt to the new technology frequently; According to Thomas & Bostrom The leaders failed to recognize technology adaptation although they recognized inherent tradeoffs. Information and communication technologies usage failures will have a domino effect on productivity; this means if the leaders fail to influence the team members and lost control over management power the whole team mechanism will lose its balance.

Other things;

Hence leaders can affect the team’s outcomes by managing adaptions of their team information and communication technology. “Project managers doing virtual projects must look at the big picture and not micromanage”. The leader of the virtual team should ensure standards stand met; and they should intervene with the team’s activity when there is a problem, like non-compliance with standards.

They get to know every team member and learn how to motivate them and communicate preferences. It is suggestive that the people are happier when they exist left alone to do; their work and team empowerment stood positively related to process improvement and customer satisfaction and vice versa. The project leaders first should understand clearly the project and the objectives they are working on. After that, they have to determine the essential skills required for the projects to select the subordinates. Trust stands developed through guidance, not by micromanaging.

Leadership in Self-Managed Virtual Teams;

In most organizations, virtual teams are typically project-based with a limited time of life span and few deliverables. These teams exist as self-managed and do not have any designated leader to lead those teams. “In this electronic context, might be better viewed as a collective effort distributed among team members characterized by the sharing and rotating of leadership roles”. Although teams typically do not have any leader assigned these teams will have external supervision. Within such teams, we can find diverse qualities of leadership behaviors exhibited by team members. The study was conducted on 22 virtual teams; which had undergraduate students from three universities, these experiments had diffusion threats and time threats to external validity.

Because the communication exchanges among high-performance teams stand characterized by a high level of directive leadership and the behaviors exhibited among the teammate by leaders were persistent over time. For me, this research gives a better idea that the Article focused more on identifying emergent leadership behavior. It found that leadership behavior stood strongly associated with the performance of these self-managed teams.

The author suggests that shared monitoring and concentrated producing behaviors were more likely to exhibit by high-performing teams. Subordinates exhibit leadership behaviors early in the team’s life; which are more predictive of success than those exhibited later during the process of emergence. “The two likely bi-products of the shared commitment to high-quality team outcomes are better relational development and greater trust among team members”. To ensure the self-managed teams are more successful both individual and collective leadership behaviors play a major role.

Model of Conflict, Leadership, and Performance in Virtual Teams;

Virtual teams are common in large organizations nowadays and more professional employees believe to work or already worked on virtual teams during their careers. These virtual teams stood dispersed geographically and culturally to facilitate the organization; with round-the-clock work and to allow qualified professionals from all over the world. These virtual teams may use for R&D, customer service, etc. Since the virtual teams have great diversity than collocated teams; these virtual teams tend to have more conflict within the team.

This study mainly concentrates on the model of conflict, Leadership, and the performance of virtual teams with conflict. The leaders are subject to Quinn’s model of leadership and evaluated for their performance concerning conflict solving skills. The data for this study stood collected from the virtual team members employed by a major U.S telecommunication corporation and virtual team members representing five firms in Korea. The firms and their location stood chosen based on the researcher’s contacts.

More things;

The test measurements were based on hypotheses of different models like The monitor role and task conflict, Use of technology-mediated communication, leadership role and team conflicts, Coordinator role and process conflict, Mentor role and relational conflict, Facilitator role, and form of conflict and leadership roles and leader effectiveness, leader effectiveness, and team performance. All the teams stand subjected to participate in electronic communications like emails, group discussions, messaging, and video conferences. The team’s leaders will virtually guide the teams to resolve the conflicts between the team members.

This research stands motivated by an interest in understanding how team leaders can effectively manage conflicts within virtual teams. Factors such as cultural diversity, geographical dispersion, few face-to-face meetings, and increased complexity gave momentum to virtual teams; and it is critical to identify the factors that contribute to virtual teams’ success. The leaders involved a more transformational, directive, and participative behaviors leadership approach had the greater team success. The internal leadership roles will improve in managing the team’s conflict and leadership; with these traits will be a better leader and the team will perform well in a virtual environment.

Transformational and Transactional Leaders;

Ruggieri stated that the effects of transactional and transformational leadership on groups in; which people interact virtually stood analyzed and specifically the level of satisfaction and perception of the style adopted existed evaluated. Most leaders who conduct transactional leadership will perceive the relationship as an exchange process between leader and follower. Namely, four principal factors stand categorized under transformational leadership: charisma, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration.

The results suggest that both transformational and transactional leadership perceived equally positive figures; Transformational leaders are intelligent and sensitive in many aspects of their leadership roles. Some of the leaders exist oriented more towards developing the relations of the subordinates rather; than focusing on the goal of the team, these exist known as charismatic leaders. They concentrate more on the future and development of the workgroup. Since these leaders involve in developing personal relations and exist future-minded; they tend to induce a more positive attitude in subordinates and motivate them toward goal achievement. Apart from being intelligent, these leaders stand stuffed with more creativity and originality.

On the other hand;

Some of the leaders stand more tasks oriented rather than focusing on building relations; they exist self-esteemed and authentic about the job definition. There are almost similar negative adjectives coming to these two types of leaders. The Multilevel regression analyses indicated that leaders’ mode of care reasoning was more positively related to follower reports of transformational leadership but not transactional leadership. The transformational approach had many dimensions of the leadership process. Generally, the process involves initiating, developing, and carrying out changes in the organization.

Transformational leadership includes nourishing and empowering followers. Since transformational leaders tend to show charismatic behaviors, these leaders can become role models to their followers. Transformational leaders encourage others and celebrate their accomplishments. In the end, transformational leadership induces a positive attitude in minds of followers making them feel better overall and increasing their contributions to achieving common goals. Transformational leadership is more efficient than other types of leadership due to its authentic factors like motivation and trust, whereas other types of leadership will have some sort of inconsistency and trouble maintaining the relations with the subordinates.

The Effects of Leadership Style and Communication Medium;

The authors explained the process briefly with their outcomes and effects on the subordinates in the teams. Also, Leaders lead the teams virtually by using communication technology as a medium where the subordinates are geographically isolated. The purpose of the study is to evaluate the leadership and sort out the best possible approaches of the leaders to achieve success for the teams; this may include a vast variety of approaches.

Since all the teams are handled virtually the communication between the team members will be in different kinds like text messaging, emails, video conference, teleconference, discussion, and many more. Also, This study gives a better idea of how the leaders are approaching the team members; and the type of interactions used by them to get the job done. The study stood conducted with 30 graduate and undergraduate students from the department of psychology acting as participants in six experimental conditions.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the leaders by conducting experiments in all possible conditions and ensure; that all the leaders are successful with the teams and typically time stands taken to complete the task on an individual basis and as a team. According to my opinion, the success of the team depends on the type of style the leader is using with the teammates and their interaction; since all the communication is virtual there are a lot of constraints taken into consideration like time, schedules, cultural and thought barriers, technical issues, and every aspect will affect the team’s performance.

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