Perception of Leadership in Virtual Teams

Sammanfattning: Virtual working in organisations is becoming more popular with the regular developments oftechnology and swift globalization. In this virtual environment, the teams working dispersed arebetter work-life balance, feeling less stress while enjoying flexible working times. However, onthe other hand, working at a distance leaves the leaders a set of unique challenges. Managingteams remotely without daily face-to-face interactions will also influence their behaviours orunderstandings towards the context of virtual leadership, such as leadership styles, motivation oradoption of communication technology and culture. Therefore, leaders will also focus oncultivating their virtual interactions with employees, tending to excel at remote leadership. In this research, under the research philosophy of pragmatism, we adopted a qualitative methodto conduct a descriptive case study, using an abductive method. Our purpose is to understand andidentify the leadership perception in virtual teams regarding the following factors: Leadershipstyles, motivation, technology and culture. Moreover, as the environment is dynamic, thebenefits and difficulties to lead virtual teams exist everywhere. Therefore, the paper also studiesleaders’ perception of these elements when facing various opportunities and challenges in thedigital world. Hence, we designed a questionnaire to interview six leaders to gain their practicalinsights and valuable opinions, providing the virtual leaders with some professionalrecommendations when leading in the virtual context. Our results in the study suggest that the leaders perceive that in order to lead virtual teamssuccessfully, the leaders need to be aware and vigilant, as it is more challenging than leadingco-located traditional teams. The leadership styles should depend upon the task at hand andwould be influenced by the leader’s characteristics; they believe the most important thing invirtual teams is communication technology and it is a leader’s responsibility to select the rightone keeping the requirements in view. About motivation, majority leaders believe that it shouldbe intrinsic, they also discuss the various ways they use to motivate their teams. Moreover, aboutCultural elements, they claim that a leader should be accepting and promoting harmony inmulticultural teams, and stress the importance of cultural training and sensitivity.