LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS IN VIRTUAL TEAMS: THE BRING FORTH OF CREATIVITY

In virtual teams, there are some factors critical to leadership effectiveness, such as leadership styles and how the leaders provide feedback to their followers. To further investigate this, the study employed a 2x2 with pretest-posttest factorial experiment design and asked 57 undergraduate juniors and MBA students of business school to form 12 virtual teams and randomly assigned to four treatment combinations to examine the impacts of leadership styles (i.e., transformational and transactional) and feedback types (i.e., encouraging and demanding) of virtual teams ’ facilitators on the team members ’ creativity and their performance. The findings indicate that team members ’ creativity improved when they received transformational leadership, but their performance of idea generation; however, did not significant increase. On the other hand, when team members were demanded by instead of encouraged by their team leaders, the team was more effective in generating their ideas; however, there is no significant increase in team member’s creativity. From this view point we may speculate that in virtual teams, members who perceived being understood and cared might feel free to express their ideas and result in higher creative thinking abilities. If achieving team goal is important, then virtue team leaders should give some pressure to demand those members who did not active in the work to enhance their performance