Leaders on their Best Behavior: Leader Behaviors Resulting in Effective Virtual Teams

A more globalized workforce, coupled with technological advances in electronic communication, have led organizations to turn to virtual work teams at a rapidly increasing rate (Gilson, Maynard, Young, Vartiainen, & Hakonen, 2015). Leadership has been shown to aid team performance across work domains (Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010), and there exist a host of functional leader behaviors that have been found to benefit face-to-face team performance (Burke, Stagl, Klein, Goodwin, Salas, & Halpin, 2006). Attention to leadership in this new era of work teams is necessary to identify those specific behaviors that enable effective virtual team functioning. Team performance, whether in the virtual context or face-to-face, requires attention to taskwork (i.e., what people do) as well as the required teamwork (i.e., how people work together to go about doing the tasking; Morgan Jr, Glickman, Woodard, Blaiwes, & Salas, 1986). Thus, drawing upon the Consideration and Initiating Structure classification of leader behaviors, the current study sought to determine which behaviors are most critical to virtual team effectiveness and other important outcomes, specifically within the context of a virtual team working on a decision-making task. This study determined that Consideration leader behaviors are most beneficial for virtual team performance, team member satisfaction, and team potency in a decision-making context. Further, perceived leader effectiveness was found to predict team member satisfaction and team potency. This work has important implications for both science and practice, including extending existing leadership theory to a new context (i.e., virtual teams) and influencing leader behaviors for decision-making teams across work domains