Leadership & Organization Development Journal

The impact of emergent virtual leadership competencies on team effectiveness

Paul Ziek Stacy Smulowitz
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Paul Ziek Stacy Smulowitz , (2014),"The impact of emergent virtual leadership competencies on team
effectiveness", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 35 Iss 2 pp. 106 - 120
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Phillip L. Hunsaker, Johanna S. Hunsaker, (2008),"Virtual teams: a leader's guide", Team
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LODJ
35,2
106
Received 30 March 2012
Revised 27 September 2012
28 September 2012
Accepted 1 October 2012
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Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
Vol. 35 No. 2, 2014
pp. 106-120
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0143-7739
DOI 10.1108/LODJ-03-2012-0043
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0143-7739.htm
The impact of emergent virtual
leadership competencies on
team effectiveness
Paul Ziek
Department of Media, Communications and Visual Arts, Pace University,
Pleasantville, New Jersey, USA, and
Stacy Smulowitz
Department of Communication, University of Scranton, Scranton,
Pennsylvania, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The research on virtual team leadership does well to describe the skills that are needed to
guide and direct effective teams. However, what is presupposed in the previous research is that virtual
teams have assigned leaders. That is, leaders were either management, appointed by management
or were chosen by the team itself. Yet in today’s global economy not all virtual teams have assigned
leaders, instead many virtual team leaders emerge on their own to direct the group’s actions.
The purpose of this paper is to examine which emergent leadership competencies most impact virtual
team effectiveness.
Design/methodology/approach – This is a mixed method study where both a participant survey
and content analysis of actual participant messages are used to determine the competencies of
emergent virtual team leaders. The research participants for the current study were required to
work in assigned teams on organizational case analyses. At the end of each case, teams presented their
solutions in the form of final recommendations designed to fix the problem present in the case.
Findings – Results indicate that not only do leaders emerge in virtual teams, but in most cases
multiple leaders emerge. Results also show that the model that best describes team effectiveness
includes the competencies of asking questions, cognitive and creative ability and vision setting.
Originality/value – The contribution of the current study is that it extends the research on emergent
virtual team leadership by introducing the idea that this type of leadership is often a collective action
among individuals. It also advances a model of emergent virtual team leadership as a practice of
communication. The better emergent virtual team leaders are at communicating to team members the
more effective the team will be in completing tasks and projects, which in turn can lead to a more
effectively functioning business unit.
Keywords Communication, Virtual teams, Emergent Leadership
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The ability to disseminate and share information through information and
communication technologies (ICTs) has redefined organizations by allowing
members separated by time and space to engage in collective work through virtual
teams ( Jarvenpaa and Leidner, 1998). Indeed the ability to overcome communication
barriers has made virtual teams prevalent in all types of organizations. However, there
are repercussions to the increased reliance on virtual teams including as Colfax et al.
(2009, p. 134) explain, how “traditional paradigms and models are not meeting the
needs of lean, austere and vibrant business operations of today.” Among the
organizational areas that have significantly changed is leadership (Connaughton and
Daly, 2005; Pick et al., 2009).
 Virtual teams have given rise to a new set of leadership challenges especially as it Virtual
relates to all-important team outcomes and performance (i.e. Hambley et al., 2007). leadership
Although virtual team leaders face a set of daunting problems that are not seen in
many traditional team settings – such as having to adapt to cultural, geographic and competencies
time differences (Fjermestad et al., 2007) and helping employees adjust to virtual work
roles and structure (Raghuram et al., 2001) – in the end, virtual team leaders must still
deliver organizational outcomes and team performance (Smulowitz, 2007). Moreover 107
even though there has been an increase in the literature on leadership in virtual teams,
there has been little focus on leadership competencies and how these skills relate to
virtual team effectiveness (Hajro and Pudelko, 2010). In addition, what is presupposed
in the virtual team leadership research is that the teams have assigned leaders. In
many instances, virtual team leaders emerge through growing influence and
contributions to the team (Yoo and Alavi, 2004). The current study explored these gaps
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in the research by examining which emergent leadership competencies most impact

virtual team effectiveness.

Literature review
The literature on virtual team leadership is growing (Ganguli and Mostashari, 2008) as
researchers from a myriad of fields including business, economics, communication and
organizational science have dedicated copious amounts of time investigating leaders of
geographically dispersed teams connected through ICTs. However, according to Gibbs
et al. (2008) most of the research on virtual team leadership focusses on developing
prescriptive leadership instructions. So although previous work describes at length
the functions of virtual team leadership and the importance of developing a proficiency
in certain skills, there are still gaps regarding which leadership competencies relate
to virtual team effectiveness (Ambrose et al., 2009). It is not that the relationship
between virtual team leadership and team effectiveness is not important, just that
certain features of it are underdeveloped in the literature.
Kayworth and Leidner (2002) relied on behavioral complexity theory as a theoretical
foundation which states that leaders must have the ability to perform multiple,
contrasting leadership behaviors in any given situation. In a virtual team setting,
behavioral complexity theory suggests that effective leaders should exhibit more
varied and complex behaviors than those who are perceived as less effective. To test
the premise, Kayworth and Leidner (2002) used a mixed methods (survey and
interviews) approach to study 13 virtual teams. The survey results indicated that both
team members and leaders perceived mentoring and communication efficiency and
satisfaction as important competencies. However, the results from interviews exhibited
variations among teams. When interviewed, team member’s perceived a leader’s ability
to overcome problems through assuming the role of motivator was most important.
To study the competencies of multinational team (MNT) leaders, Joshi and Lazarova
(2005) conducted semi-structured interviews with group leaders and group members of
a software development division of a Fortune 500 computer company. While the
current study is not an investigation into MNT leadership, the literature is reviewed
here because much testing on virtual leadership occurs within MNTs. Overall, nine
competencies were identified from a content analysis of the interview data: direction
and goal setting, communication, facilitating teamwork, motivating and inspiring,
empowering, boundary spanning, mentoring and resource acquisition. The
overwhelming majority of respondents, whether a leader or team member, identified
direction and goal setting as the most important competency. The goal setting
 LODJ competency includes being visible, setting clear goals and providing guidance to
35,2 members in all locations. Communication was acknowledged as the second most
important leadership competency and respondents stated that this included enabling
open and proactive communication, actively listening and establishing personal
relationships across locations.
Revisiting the MNT context Joshi et al. (2009) extended leadership theories with
108 social identity theory. Using a web survey of members of an international Fortune 500
company, Joshi et al. (2009) focussed on studying commitment and trust because of the
importance these competencies play in facilitating group effectiveness in dispersed
settings. They found that in virtual team settings “lack of physical proximity, shared
context, and spontaneous communications with team members reduce the salience of a
team identity” ( Joshi et al., 2009, p. 249). Joshi et al. explain that inspirational leadership
is integral to overcoming reduced team identity because these types of leaders acted
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to bring salience back to the teams’ identity by presenting team members with their
vision and mission (Smulowitz, 2007). In addition, the study served to support the
contention that by cultivating socialized relationships with team members,
inspirational leaders are able to foster attitudes directed at the collective team entity.
Despite the fact that a substantial body of literature has addressed MNTs in general,
Hajro and Pudelko (2010) believed that the competencies of leaders in the MNT context
are relatively understudied. In order to fill the gap, they examined the competencies
that leaders should possess in order to effectively lead MNTs. Their approach was to
conduct problem-centered interviews with 38 MNT leaders and 32 MNT members
across five companies. The participants were asked to explain how a team leader can
improve the effectiveness of his/her team and cope with critical incidents that are likely
to emerge in MNTs. The results showed that by far the most frequently mentioned
competency was knowledge management and transfer which is when leaders
contribute to the creation and dissemination of knowledge within and beyond the MNT
(see also Ruben et al., 2007).
The research on virtual team leadership does well to describe the skills that are
needed to guide and direct effective teams. However, what is presupposed in the
previous research is that virtual teams have assigned leaders. That is, leaders were
either management, appointed by management or were chosen by the team itself. Yet
in today’s global economy, not all teams have assigned leaders (Carte et al., 2006).
Instead, in many virtual teams leaders emerge or move forward on their own to direct
the group’s actions. In addition team participants perceive these members as leaders
(Wickham and Walther, 2007). Therefore missing from the research on virtual team
leadership is an understanding of the competencies that emergent leaders possess.
As Yoo and Alavi (2004) explained, emergent team leadership is a special circumstance
not based on organizational position but through growing influence and contributions.
We propose to address the gap in the literature by answering the research question:

RQ1. What emergent leadership competencies are related to team effectiveness?

The first step to solving the research question posed in the paper is to determine
whether or not leaders emerge in virtual teams. After solving this portion of the puzzle
then the competencies of the emergent leaders can be studied in relation to group
effectiveness. Methodologically we rely on both a survey and content analysis of
virtual team messages to explore the emergence of leaders and the specific emergent
leadership competencies needed for team effectiveness. The results point to some
 interesting patterns of competencies as they relate to group effectiveness, which are Virtual
used to extend the current literature on leadership challenges in virtual team settings. leadership
Methodology competencies
Virtual teams
The research participants for the current study included 60 undergraduate students
enrolled in two sections of the same course. The students were grouped into ten teams 109
of six students per team mixed from both sections of the course. Students were
required to work in the assigned teams on organizational cases analyses where the
team would discuss problems, theoretical insights and solutions to the cases. The
assignments, except for a final presentation, were to be completed in an online
course management system. Students were instructed to only use the course
management system to interact about the cases as they would only be graded for their
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online participation. However, they were not forbidden to use face-to-face (FtF) or other
online tools.
At the end of each case, teams were to present their solutions in the form of final
recommendations designed to fix the problem present in the case. The final
recommendations were the culmination of the team’s work on the case and were graded
by the instructor. Therefore group effectiveness was assessed by the percentage grades
(Walther and Bunz, 2005) given by the instructors for the final recommendations,
i.e., group effectiveness was measured as per the output of the virtual teams (Kayworth
and Leidner, 2002; Walther and Bunz, 2005).
The students completed three case analyses during the semester. We had access
to the course management system through an administrator login that allowed us to
observe chat logs and print transcripts throughout the semester without alerting
students to our presence.

Instruments
The current study uses both a survey and content analysis to determine the
competencies of emergent virtual team leaders. The leadership literature provided
several sources that described leadership characteristics, traits and competencies
(e.g. Argyris, 1953; Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991; Nadler and Tushman, 1990; Yoon
et al., 2010). However, none of this literature dealt directly with emergent leadership
competencies. To make up for this deficiency, we combined the traditional FtF
competency scales of leadership with those found in the literature on virtual teams. In
the end, the mixed method approach allowed us to study a wide range of predefined
competencies from various sources in the literature within one online survey tool.

Survey
The survey was based on Ruben’s (2005, 2006) Leadership Competencies Scorecard
Inventory (LCSI) (see Appendix 1) because nearly all the characteristics and traits
discussed by the other researchers can be found in one of the five competency areas of
analytic, personal, communication, organizational and positional competencies. The
salience of the LCSI has proven to be useful in the study of a variety of leadership
contexts (i.e. Ziek, 2011) making it a perfect complement to the competencies found in
the virtual team leadership literature. The LCSI uses a single-item, five-interval
Likert Scale format to measure opinions of the analytic, personal, communication and
organizational competencies found prevalent in leaders. However, we also added a few
questions prior to Ruben’s LCSI, including if the students felt one or more leaders
 LODJ emerged within their team, if the participant felt that they were the leader and then
35,2 we asked the participants to also identify the leader(s) of the teams by name.
These added questions allowed us to compare some important leadership traits
within each team such as: agreement of team members on the leader(s); and the
competencies said to be prevalent in the leader based on team members’ perception.
The survey was administered electronically and 80 percent (n ¼ 48) of the students
110 participated.

Content analysis
Kayworth and Leidner (2002) explained that in a virtual team setting, leaders should
exhibit more varied and complex behaviors. Thus, to supplement the traditional scales,
content analysis was used to integrate six additional competencies previously found
by Yoo and Alavi (2004), Kayworth and Leidner (2002) and Wickham and Walther
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(2007) as specific to virtual leadership. These competencies included: frequency of

communication (Kayworth and Leidner, 2002; Hackman and Johnson, 2004; Yoo and
Alavi, 2004; Wickham and Walther, 2007), quantity of communication (Hackman
and Johnson, 2004; Yoo and Alavi, 2004), primacy of communication (Hackman and
Johnson, 2004; Yoo and Alavi, 2004), focus on communication quality (Hackman
and Johnson, 2004; Yoo and Alavi, 2004) and the demonstration of roles (Kayworth and
Leidner, 2002; Yoo and Alavi, 2004; Wickham and Walther, 2007). To study these
emergent virtual leadership competencies, we examined the messages participants
posted on the online course management program, which included 1,030 posted
messages from the 60 participants. To maintain reliability, we devised a coding
scheme (see Appendix 2) and used two coders who reached 96 percent inter-coder
reliability.

Results
Emergent leaders
In all, 92 percent of the respondents stated that a leader did emerge. In total, 20
emergent leaders were selected and of that three, or 15 percent, received one vote. In
other words, 85 percent of the emergent leaders were chosen by multiple team
members. In addition to the survey question asking participants to identify leaders and
others (Yoo and Alavi, 2004), we created an agreement measure “by dividing the
number of times an individual was nominated by the number of opportunities for
nomination to occur” (Wickham and Walther, 2007, p. 9). For example, four members
of group B participated in the survey and stated that Adam was the leader with a score
of 0.8 (see Table I). The names used in the document are pseudonyms created to
maintain anonymity and confidentiality of the participants.

Leadership competencies
During their study of virtual teams, both Yoo and Alavi (2004) and Wickham and
Walther (2007) found that there is a relationship between communication frequency
and virtual leadership. “Leaders in virtual teams send more messages” than
non-leaders (Yoo and Alavi, 2004, p. 41). Following this research, we counted the
frequency of individual message posts (n ¼ 1,030, mean ¼ 17, SD ¼ 10) and found that
emergent leaders do communicate more frequently than others (i.e. Yoo and Alavi,
2004). Leaders, on average, sent 27 messages while others sent an average of 12
messages. In addition, while analyzing e-mail messages of virtual team members,
 Group Leader Score
Virtual
leadership
B Adam 0.80 competencies
C Christie 1.0
D Amanda 0.90
Melissa 0.33
Maria 0.50 111
E Dan 0.75
Lawrence 0.80
F Amy 0.33
Katherine 0.33
Lauren 0.83
G Christina 0.75
H Krista 1.0
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I Allison 1.0
J Annette 0.80
JeanPierre 0.40
K Abe 0.50
Colleen 0.75
Table I.
Notes: Nick (Group D), Michael (Group G) and Jessica (Group K) all received 1 vote as leader Emergent leaders

Yoo and Alavi (2004, p. 39) discovered that “messages sent by emergent leaders were
significantly longer than the ones by other members.” To study message length and
determine if there was a difference between leaders and others, each message post was
measured by counting the number of words in the post (Yoo and Alavi, 2004)
(sum ¼ 134,724, mean ¼ 2,245, SD ¼ 1,589). Results show that there was a 42 percent
difference in the amount of words posted between leaders and others. Over the cases
leaders averaged 3,635 (33.3 percent) words posted where as the other team members
averaged 1,551 (66.7 percent).
Beyond the length and amount of messages, previous examinations of virtual
leadership describe leaders as being proactive communicators, which is defined as
influencing the tempo, progression and type of group communication (e.g. Joshi and
Lazarova, 2005; Yoo and Alavi, 2004; Wickham and Walther, 2007). To measure the
competency of tempo, the participants were rated on their first post to each section of
the case analysis (mean ¼ 2.3, SD ¼ 0.71). However, unlike earlier studies, here the
primacy of communication was not indicative of leaders. That is, leaders were not
always the first team members to post to the case. Clearly from the results regarding
the above variables, and the description of previous examinations of virtual leadership,
communication is an important leadership competency. Virtual teams are often void of
FtF interaction and thus virtual leaders must become adept at communication
efficiency (i.e. Kayworth and Leidner, 2002). To further determine how adept leaders
were at communication efficiency (Kayworth and Leidner, 2002), we deemed messages
either task or procedural. The point here is that leaders will work to keep the team
moving forward both on the content of the discussion but also on the deliverable. The
notion that leaders will use both task and procedural messages is important to consider
because individuals were graded based on both their contributions to the discussion as
well as the team’s final deliverable. There were 899 task related (mean ¼ 15, SD ¼ 7)
and 143 process related (mean ¼ 2, SD ¼ 4) posts. There was a clear difference between
 LODJ leaders and others as leaders made an average of six procedural posts and others
35,2 averaged less than one procedural post during the study. The following message from
Dan, in Team E, is a typical task message:

I agree with your points, except that by having a real leader of this group, that means you will
have wrecked the pure concertive control the upper management has put in place. They said
they left the old system of line leads and supervisors to save costs, so there is no way any one
112 individual will wind up being that way. What they should do is meet more as a team and run
every single major decision on hiring and firing on upper management. They should also go
through proper training, as concertive control in a vacuum does nothing to actually control
the group.

The following message from Amanda, in Team D, is a typical procedural message:

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There is also an email part of this website that we can use to contact everyone, the problem is
though, that not everyone can chat or get in touch with each other at the same time! Not
everyone from our group is even posting so that’s a problem. I’m fine with handing in the final
product, but I need to know that everyone agrees on a common product.

The final virtual team leadership competency that was studied was the demonstration
of roles (Kayworth and Leidner, 2002; Yoo and Alavi, 2004; Wickham and Walther,
2007). Although there are many important roles in virtual teams (i.e. broker, producer,
monitor, facilitator, director, coordinator; Denison et al., 1995), we specifically coded for
the role of integrator because of the short interval life-span of the teams. The integrator
role is crucial to the design of these teams because each case study requires the
submission of a final case recommendation. An integrator will work to coordinate the
other team members into a unified whole so that the final case recommendations will
be completed correctly and on time.
The following message from Christina, in Team G, is a typical integrator message:

Team G FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS – (Please see attached document for team

recommendations. Solutions by Group G. doc).

The integrator variable was measured using a nominal level: integrators were coded
as “yes” and non-integrators as “no.” In total, 17 integrators emerged from the ten
teams, of which 88 percent (n ¼ 20) were emergent leaders. Results show that there was
a 49 percent difference in the amount of words posted between integrators and others.
Over the cases integrators averaged 3,508 (28 percent) words posted where as the other
team members averaged 1,742 (72 percent).
All but four of the competencies studied from the FtF scale ( problem definition,
problem solving, review of results and influence and persuasion), had a score
four and above. That is, emergent leaders were perceived to have above average
skills in the ten remaining competencies. Interestingly, problem definition, problem
solving and review of results are all “analytic competencies” that Ruben (2006, p. 15)
states “is one of the more important aspects of leadership.” However, considering
the teams have no history, the need for the competencies of problem definition
and problem solving are limited to what was included in the assignment and
therefore leaders did not have to navigate issues among team members, with
technology, with superiors, etc. In addition, with no team history, the competency
of review of analysis or, the “ability to analyze and learn from history” (Ruben, 2006,
p. 22) is superfluous.
 Team effectiveness Virtual
To measure team effectiveness course instructors graded the final recommendations leadership
designed to fix the problem present in the case which was the culmination of the team’s
work on the case. Therefore team effectiveness was assessed by the percentage grades competencies
(Walther and Bunz, 2005) given by the instructors for the final recommendations,
i.e. team effectiveness was measured as per the output of the virtual teams (Kayworth
and Leidner, 2002; Walther and Bunz, 2005). 113
We found that those leaders who received a higher score on both the virtual and
traditional FtF competences also participated in teams that were more effective – or
received a higher grade. For example, the most effective team had the highest grade
average, 90.5 percent, over both cases. The least effective team had the lowest
grade average, 80.5 percent, over both cases. While it is not difficult to imagine that
leaders with better “leadership competencies” should work with teams that are more
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effective, the current study serves as a test case to affirming that notion. But because
the model of leadership competencies created for the current study included multiple
independent variables, the researchers built a regression model to determine what
competencies best explain team effectiveness.
The results indicate that there were differences in the competencies used by
emergent leaders in effective teams vs the other less-effective teams. The model that
best describes team effectiveness, or the dependent variable grades, includes
the following competencies: asking questions, cognitive and creative ability and
vision setting. These three competencies are the best predictors of team effectiveness
because they explain 36 percent of the variation in the grades and infer that the
better a leader scored on them, the higher the team scored. From a review of the
discussion logs it is clear to see that the participants who emerged as leaders
generally displayed these competencies. For example, the following message
from Marie, in Team D, is a typical demonstration of the asking questions
competency:
GENERAL NOTE TO EVERYONE: Its time we start thinking about who is going to do the
final solution to hand in. Any volunteers?? If not we will have to work out some way of
assigning it fairly to someone.
The following post from Annette, in Team J, is an example of a vision-setting
competency:
Just a quick reminder! I posted this in the last case study but at the bottom, so I just wanted to
make sure everyone read this at the top. To make our lives easier please split up your posts so
each contains only one problem! It’ll make it easier for all the other parts of the assignment,
plus it’ll be easier to respond for everyone else. I know the professor made this announcement
in class, but not everyone might have been in attendance.

Thanks!
This post by Alison, in Team I, provides an example of a cognitive ability and creative
competency:

Loss of identity. I feel that the company has reduced certain perks for the employees and has
now left the employees with a lower feeling of company identity. Through the perks I think
the employees felt like they were special and important to the company, but now with the lack
of these incentives, or benefits I feel the workers feel that their work is less appreciated and
that they are not as important to the company.
 LODJ In response, Louis, also in Team I, provided backup to Alison’s demonstration of
35,2 insight into the case analysis:

I agree with you that they feel less appreciated.

114 Discussion
The increased use and reliance on virtual teams has given rise to the attention of the
dimensions of leadership within these teams. The current study examined the
competencies exhibited by emergent virtual team leaders and how these competencies
relate to team effectiveness. As such, the current study brings important implications
to light for managers and leaders of virtual teams.
One implication is that virtual team leaders must recognize that team effectiveness
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is related to their communication (Shachaf and Hara, 2005). Communication is the tool
through which virtual leaders assume their position and status within the team.
Because emergent leaders assume their role, as they are not assigned or appointed in
anyway, they must communicate in a way that motivates and inspires the team to be
effective (Tyran et al., 2003). Specifically, leaders must be competent in asking
questions and have the ability to communicate their vision for the project, which
ultimately brings salience to team identity (Smulowitz, 2007; Smulowitz and Ziek,
2013) by overcoming reduced team identity ( Joshi et al., 2009) inherent in any virtual
team.
Another implication has to do with the shared leadership of virtual teams. As
Wickham and Walther (2007, p. 11) describe, “CMC groups may identify with more
than one leader.” The current study found that 47 percent of the respondents stated
that two or more leaders emerged. However, and more importantly, respondents from
six of the ten teams selected multiple emergent leaders. Therefore, most of the virtual
teams involved in this study were significantly shaped by multiple emergent leaders.
These findings demonstrate that leadership in an electronic online environment can be
defined as a collaborative, collective action. Since these leaders do not have the
opportunity to choose the team they must become proficient at balancing the skills of
team members. Once a team leader has evaluated the team, actions must be taken to
effectively perform the required tasks.
In this instance, leadership is related to the situational approach where “leadership
styles focusses on flexible, adaptable leader behavior” and “additionally, leadership
behavior can be exhibited in varying degrees of skillfulness” (Witherspoon, 1997,
p. 58). Emergent virtual team leadership is a collective action among certain
individuals within a group. The theory of collective action describes how individuals
work toward delivering certain goods such as roads, bridges, interactive
communication systems, etc. (i.e. Samuelson, 1954). This theory has become central
in social science research and has been employed to explain a great array of diverse
phenomena. This theory can be used here to expand the leadership context because
these multiple team leaders were working together to deliver a good, which in this case
was the final case recommendation. But more particularly, why collective action fits
so well is that it best explains how multiple leaders overcome the problems of free
riding (Olson, 1965). Free riding is where team members choose to let others do the
bulk of the work. In these teams, multiple individuals emerged to share in the actions
relative to virtual team leadership and in doing so made-up for the work of the free
riders. The following message from Amanda, in Team D, is an example of such
 collective action found in this study where emergent leaders were more active team Virtual
participants and thus compensated for the free riders: leadership
You can do whatever you want to try to get them to participate more, but honestly, we have competencies
written numerous posts on here, I’ve written an email, I mean, what more can we do? If they
don’t want to collaborate with us, we can’t do anything more about it. It’s shame to have to
say that but it’s true.
This then brings to the forefront some research trajectories related to the emergence 115
of multiple virtual team leaders. To begin, future research needs to study how multiple
emergent leaders work together. That is, do their competencies overlap or work in
conjunction with one another? For instance, does one leader exhibit extroversion
and thus has a high quotient for motivating the team whereas the other leads
through idea initiation. To do this will require coding for additional competencies
such as the expression of opinions, leader definition of roles, motivation effort,
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performance evaluation, feedback, as well as behavioral displays of cognitive ability

and openness.

Limitations
As with any study, this one is not without its limitations. There is a limited sample size
(n ¼ 60) and this was a one-time study. This limitation is balanced by the context of the
study. Virtual teams are a growing phenomenon as organizations are relying heavily
on them to maximize productivity, lower costs, serve customers and capitalize on
globally dispersed talent which means that there is a need to understand effective
practices for leading these teams (Burtha and Connaughton, 2004). Another limitation
is that the study uses student teams, perhaps questioning the relevance of virtual
teams in the workplace. The limitation is mitigated by the fact that today’s
undergraduate students already rely heavily on computer-mediated communication
and virtual teams. Strong business and social pressures are currently driving
corporations, non-profit and educational institutions to adopt virtual teams (Ebrahim
et al., 2009) therefore students are currently working in virtual teams through
internships and online courses. Finally, there is the limitation that the students
overwhelming disliked the chat function technology of the course management system,
which they believed hindered their ability to properly manage interactions
(Ziek and Smulowitz, 2010). This is mitigated by the fact that students are very
familiar and savvy with electronic media (e.g. Raghuram et al., 2001) and therefore
develop work-a-rounds so that the quality of the leader-member exchange does
not suffer.

Conclusion
Theorists, researchers and academics that have focussed on leadership for the past
century have produced a variety of important research on the practice. However,
research on virtual team leadership (Badrinarayanan and Arnett, 2008; Ebrahim et al.,
2009), in general, and emergent virtual team leadership (Yoo and Alavi, 2004),
specifically, is in the early stages. Not all virtual teams have assigned leaders. Instead
some rise on their own to direct the team’s actions, especially in today’s interconnected
world (Carte et al., 2006). The current study contributes to the knowledge on
emergent virtual team leaders by providing a way to understand how a leader’s
competencies relate to team effectiveness. It advances a model of emergent virtual
team leadership as a practice of communication. The better an emergent virtual team
 LODJ leader is at communicating to team members the more effective the team will be in
35,2 completing tasks and projects, which in turn can lead to a more effectively functioning
business unit.

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Appendix 1. Survey instrument

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competencies
leadership
Virtual

119
 LODJ Appendix 2. Coding scheme
Emergent leadership in virtual teams coding scheme
35,2 Sheets are organized by group letter (B-K) in separate Excel worksheets. In each worksheet is the
participant’s name followed by the following column labels:
(1) Number of posts (label each post as 1 and use a new row for each).
(2) Length of post (word count of each post).
120 (3) Composition of post:
. Task (label this as 1 if the post was task in nature, leave blank if procedural).
. Procedural (label this as 1 if the post was procedural in nature, leave blank if task).
(4) Time (write in name):
. 1 ¼ first to post.
. 2 ¼ middle post.
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. 3 ¼ late to post.

(5) Integrator (Yes if integrator, leave blank if not).

About the authors

Dr Paul Ziek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Communications, and Visual
Arts at the Pace University – Pleasantville (NY). His primary research interest is how the
communication-information-media matrix shapes interaction and communication. Paul holds
a BA from Rutgers, an MA from the New York University, and a PhD from the School of
Communication and Information at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Dr Paul Ziek is
the corresponding author and can be contacted at: pziek@pace.edu
Professor Stacy Smulowitz, PhD Candidate, ABC, is an Instructor in the Department of
Communication at the University of Scranton (PA) where she teaches courses in advertising.
Smulowitz is completing her dissertation at the Rutgers University, where her studies focus on
theory and strategy for assessing and promoting excellence in organizational leadership. She
also holds a master’s degree from the Ithaca College in corporate communication, a bachelor’s
degree from the Wilkes University in organizational and interpersonal communication, and is
accredited through the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).

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