#Teamleadership: Leadership For Today’S Multicultural, Virtual, And Distributed Teams

Teams today face a vast number of challenges as they become increasingly diverse, distributed, and virtual, each of which can have its advantages and disadvantages in terms of influencing team functioning. Given these complexities, it is important to understand what factors may be able to help improve their performance and reduce the likelihood of critical errors. One proposed avenue for effectively facilitating teamwork in complex environments is that of team leadership. However, team leadership does not necessarily have to rely solely upon a single individual. Indeed, there may be multiple leaders on a team, with different members sharing leadership responsibilities or rotating leadership to ensure effectiveness, referred to as collective leadership. The purpose of the current chapter is to explore existing research as it may contribute to our understanding of how to best utilize collective team leadership as a mechanism for effectively working in the multicultural, distributed, and virtual environments of today