Effective Coordination of Shared Leadership in Global Virtual Teams

Abstract

In this study we investigate how shared leadership is coordinated in global virtual teams and how it relates to team effectiveness. Based on 71 interviews with team members and leaders from eight teams from two global software development companies, we found that shared leadership had a more positive effect on team effectiveness when shared leadership was coordinated both implicitly and behaviorally. Implicit leadership coordination is about members sharing same perceptions or cognitive schemas regarding who has leadership over what, and influences whether leadership actions are acted upon. With a mix of national cultures in the team, members are less likely to share the same leadership expectations, which may make shared leadership less effective. In turn, behavioral leadership coordination is associated with the explicit actions aimed at coordinating the leadership activities taking place in the team. This behavioral coordination increases in importance with a higher degree of shared leadership. Our findings contribute to theory and practice by showing that when leadership is highly shared in the team and uncoordinated, it may actually lead to detrimental effects in terms of lower team effectiveness. In contrast, shared leadership may reap its potential benefits if it is well coordinated.

Key words and phrases:

• global virtual teams
• team leadership
• team effectiveness
• shared leadership
• online leadership

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emma S. Nordbäck

Emma Nordbäck ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Management Studies at Aalto University School of Business, Finland. She received her doctoral degree from Aalto University School of Science. Her research focuses on virtual work arrangements ranging from globally distributed teams to workplace flexibility, with a special emphasis on technology, leadership, and boundary-spanning practices for innovation. Dr. Nordbäck’s work has been published in such journals as Journal of Organization Design, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, and in various leading academic conference proceedings.

J. Alberto Espinosa

J. Alberto Espinosa ([email protected]) is a Professor of Information Technology and Analytics at the Kogod School of Business, American University. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. He has co-authored two books on work coordination across time zones, and on big data and analytics for service delivery. He has published in leading journals, including Management Science; Organization Science; Information Systems Research; the Journal of Management Information Systems; IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management; Communications of the ACM and others. He also has many years of experience as a senior manager for global organizations.