The influence of a global corporate culture on the leadership of virtual teams

Companies from across the globe move from traditional towards virtual organisations to be able to respond effectively to developments and changes in the global economy. As a consequence, the leadership of virtual teams will evolve as one of the major challenges future leaders will have to face. Hence, this triggers a growing demand in knowledge and understanding of virtual teams from both science and practice. So far, there is only basic research available on key elements of virtual teaming and limited literature on the leadership of virtual teams. With the increasing significance of a corporate culture in organisations, science will want to investigate its impact on virtual team leadership. Shedding light into this matter is hence this dissertation\''s main objective. After a thorough literature review and a pre-study, a leading EURO STOXX 50 company which has rolled out a global corporate culture in the past years was investigated using interviews with experienced virtual team leaders. Their experiences from before and after the introduction of a global corporate culture were assessed and analysed. Finally, focus groups were conducted to validate the results. In order to provide a holistic picture of the influence of a global corporate culture on the leaders of virtual teams, each empirical component follows a three phase sequence. First, it seeks to understand the environment of a virtual team leader, aiming specifically at investigating how the corporate culture shifts the behaviour of virtual team members. In the next phase, it focuses on how virtual leaders then react to the shift in team member behaviour. The last phase focuses on how the leaders are directly influenced by the global corporate culture themselves. The results of the study show that a common global corporate culture positively influences the collaboration of virtual team members and increases harmony between them. This leads to higher team performance. In response to this shift in team behaviour as well as due to the direct impact of the corporate culture, the leader himself switches gradually from a transactional towards a transformational leadership style, thereby again increasing the performance of the team. The results of the empirical research are channelled into a final product, namely detailed best practices for virtual team leaders on how to develop themselves and their team into effective virtual collaborators. This model uses corporate culture as a catalyst