Team Leadership in remote settings An Actor-Network Theory Analysis

Sammanfattning: Team Leadership (TL) is a topic that has been widely studied throughout the years. Previous studies on TL were focused on the individual and collective perspective. In recent years, technologies were included in the collective perspectives of TL under a remote setting by with the formation of Virtual Teams (VTs). When conducting our research, we aspire to bring insights into how TL is executed when an unexpected event forces organisations to work remotely. In order to structure our Empirical Findings, we approached Leadership as practices to organise our data. To achieve this, both Team Managers/Leaders and Team members of two large companies Arla and Volvo Cars were interviewed along with an observation in a team monthly meeting from Arla. After analysing the data, we came up with five TL practices. Afterwards, with the ANT perspective, we aimed to examine the different interactions and alterations that occurred in TL practices between human and non-human actants, which are considered equally important. To illustrate how these two were translating each other, it highlighted the ability of humans to bring their presence through technologies. We conclude that Covid-19 turned out to be the driving force which opened the blackbox revealing the unfolding of new hybrid collectifs. These reformulated networks are depicting the new TL practices which arose as an effect of the translation processes that occurred.