1. Introduction
This study consists in linked virtual teamwork with virtual shared leadership and we will start studying briefly what does the universal literature said about the leadership with the general concepts and different approaches. After we will define what virtual leadership and distributed/shared leadership are, trying to involve different points of view. We know that this a hard case study once not always the people do that they said and not act as they may, so will used our hardest instincts to catch detailed information to the interviewed staff.
In the current century the world had move on more competitive, thunder quick back information and coarse in the sea of news technologies at the end always to know how can lead people is most important question for the business man once people generate in many ways the riches in the countries and in the companies, but what happen when this leadership is shared not only with the people in the same company also with staff in subsidiaries in other country?; what kind of problems will deal? What can do the company to less these problems?
Leadership had a great mass of literature which, if it were to be assembled in one place, would fill many libraries. The great part of this mass, however, would have little organization; it would evidence little in the way of common assumptions and hypotheses; it would vary widely in theoretical and methodological approaches (Clarence, 1958). But there are less literature about mixed three different concepts virtual, shared and leadership; if talk about them separately probably the literature will be double.
This work is structured in the following way: first will talk about my research objectives with my two important questions and after coming an explanation about the concept of leadership, the different approaches; virtual leadership and shared leadership in a virtual teamwork concepts are important points talked in, finishing with the methodology using case study.
2. Research Objectives
I try to find the answer to the following question:
· What are the difficulties of implementing shared virtual leadership in a virtual environment?
· What can the organization do for improve and facilitate the process in shared virtual leadership?
Currently the virtual life becomes a real and important issue inside the global companies and as life style.
3. Literature Review
3.1 Introduction
In this section we will to explore the definitions about leadership and different approaches talked about it including opposite points of view whilst one think that a leader born with special capabilities, as elite human, other theory consider the role of followers and the contextual nature of leadership.
We will conceptualize virtual leadership and shared leadership in a virtual environment. At the end we will separated the concepts about distributed and shared leadership.
3.2 Leadership: What is it about?
What does the leadership is? Leadership is the "the ability of an individual to influence, motivate and enable others to contribute towards the effectiveness and success of the organization of which they are members" (House et al., 1999), for Yukl (1998) is “the process of influencing others tounderstand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and theprocess of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish sharedobjectives”. Leadership is a process, leadership involves influencing others, leadership happens within the context of a group, leadership involves goal attainment, and these goals are shared by leaders and their followers. Leadership is about influence, the ability to influence your subordinates, your peers, and your bosses in a work or organizational context. Without influence, it is impossible to be a leader. Of course, having influence means that there is a greater need on the part of leaders to exercise their influence ethically (Yukl, 1998). Leadership is want influence; can to influence thoughts and actions people and take the risk to deal with people, power and lost the auto control.
The difference between a leader and a management is that a leader inspires, acts as mentor, motive and align all the stakeholders.
A leader may to play roles like (Innovator) coming up with inventive ideas, experimenting with new concepts and ideas; (Broker) exerting influence in the virtual teamwork; (Producer) ensuring that teammates meet the short-long goals; (Director) clarifying priorities and directions, making clear the teammate’s roles; (Coordinator) anticipating problems and avoiding internal crisis, bringing a sense of order in the work; (Monitor) controlling the work, comparing records, reports and detecting any potential problem; (Facilitator) surfacing key difference among team members and then working participatively to resolving them, encouraging participative decision-making; (Mentor) showing empathy and concern in dealing between teammates, treating teammates in a sensitive and caring way (Denison et al, 1995). The leader may alleviate confusions facilitating intra-team communication to create a consolidated picture of the team’s status (Kayworth & Leidner, 2001).
A review of the leadership literature reveals an evolving series of points of view from Great Man and Trait theories to Transformational leadership. Whilst first theories tend to focus upon the characteristics and behaviors of successful leaders, later theories begin to consider the role of followers and the contextual nature of leadership.
3.2.1Great Man Theories
This theorythinks that leaders are exceptional people, born with innate qualities, destined to lead. The use of the term “man” was intentional since until the latter part of the twentieth century leadership was thought of as a concept which is primarily male, military and Western(Bolden,et al, 2003).
3.2.2Trait Theories
Inside trait theorycall virtually all the adjectives in the dictionary which describe some positive or virtuous human attribute, from ambition to zest for life. The problem with the trait approach lies in the fact that almost as many traits as studies undertaken were identified. After several years of such research, it became apparent that no consistent traits could be identified. Although some traits were found in a considerable number of studies, the results were generally inconclusive. Some leaders might have possessed certain traits but the absence of them did not necessarily mean that the person was not a leader (Bolden,et al, 2003).
Although there was little consistency in the results of the various trait studies, however, some traits did appear more frequently than others, including: technical skill, friendliness, task motivation, application to task, group task supportiveness, social skill, emotional control, administrative skill, general charisma, and intelligence. Of these, the most widely explored has tended to be “charisma” (Bolden, et al, 2003).
3.2.3 Behaviorist Theories
These theories concentrated on what leaders actually do rather than on their qualities. Different patterns of behavior are observed and categorized as styles of leadership. This area has probably attracted most attention from practicing managers. McGregor influenced all the behavioral theories, which emphasize focusing on human relationships, along with output and performance (Bolden, et al, 2003).
3.2.4 Situational Leadership
This approach sees leadership as specific to the situation in which it is being exercised. For example, whilst some situations may require an autocratic style, others may need a more participative approach. It also proposes that there may be differences in required leadership styles at different levels in the same organization (Bolden, et al, 2003).
3.2.5 Contingency Theory
Whilst behavioral theories may help managers develop particular leadership behaviors they give little guidance as to what constitutes effective leadership in different situations. Indeed, most researchers today conclude that no one leadership style is right for every manager under all circumstances. Instead, contingency-situational theories were developed to indicate that the style to be used is contingent upon such factors as the situation, the people, the task, the organization, and other environmental variables (Bolden, et al, 2003).
3.2.6 Transactional Leadership
This approach emphasizes the importance of the relationship between leader and followers, focusing on the mutual benefits derived from a form of contract through which the leader delivers such things as rewards or recognition in return for the commitment or loyalty of the followers (Bolden, et al, 2003).
3.2.7 Transformational Leadership
The central concept here is change and the role of leadership in envisioning and implementing the transformation of organizational performance (Bolden, et al, 2003).
Virtual teams required active leadership and not a passive action including intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence. Intellectual stimulation behaviors involve encouraging followers to challenge assumptions, approach old issues in new ways, take risks, and be innovative and creative.
In order to keep a team on track and fulfilling its potential, a leadership function that must be performed is the monitoring of the team. This function is not limited to only monitoring team members’ processes and performance, but also extends to monitoring the environment (Hackman & Walton, 1986; McGrath, 1962; Yukl, 1998). Team monitoring provides critical information to team members that influence the impact of subsequent leadership functions. When team monitoring is present, team leaders are seen as more effective and the team is more cohesive (Kane, et al 2002).
Leaders are likely to play a vital role in facilitating the processes of a virtual team by providing structures, motivating and engaging team members, and attending to socio-emotional aspects of the team. In virtual teams leader have to establish norm at the beginning to maintain the appropriate progress (Walther, et al, 1992)
Research has demonstrated that leaders can make a critical difference to team performance and effectiveness (e.g., Morgeson, 2005; Zaccaro & Klimoski, 2002).A crucial differentiator between mediocre and high performing virtual teams is the development of virtual leaders who are able to develop and lead virtual teams. Effective management of virtual teams is necessary but not sufficient: there is a real need for virtual leadership (Caulat, 2006). Often leaders and managers just “end-up” leading and managing virtual teams without having necessarily learnt to do so. They often do not realize that developing high performing virtual teams requires some different leadership and management skills. Often they actually do not dare expressing that they need help (Caulat, 2006). Also only a minority of organizations have realized that virtual working needs specific support and endorsement. Sometimes some individuals felt that their organizations did not actively support them in virtual working as well as they would have liked. They felt that although their organizations sanctioned virtual working, they did not visibly and culturally support the virtual working ethos. At this stage it seems that only a few organizations have explicitly assessed the value of virtual working and developed a strategy for it, or have a program to attend to the technological, social and psychological needs of their employees.
Since communication media may differ in their ability to convey “social presence,” information-rich nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions, voice inflections, and gestures, may be lost or distorted through CMCS that lack the social presence inherent to face-to-face environments (Kiesler, 1992). Also, the ability to develop relational links among team members may be hindered, which may negatively affect such outcomes as creativity, morale, decision-making quality, and process loss (Walther,1992). Finally, the lack of a social context may alter or hinder the process through which team members develop trust (Jarvenpaa et al. 1998).
Williams (2002) defines virtual leadership as leading in an environment that is other than physical.Virtual leadership could be describeas the management of distributed work teams whose members predominantly communicate and coordinate their work via electronic media. Fisher and Fisher (2001) describe virtual leaders as "boundary managers" who inspire people in distance locations to develop self-managed capabilities and who focus more on the interface issues with the environment.
Traditionally, leadership research has focused on individual leaders and by extension on vertical approaches to organizing work task. The work of leadership in this view is to make strategic decisions and then to influence and align the rest of the organization to implement these decisions effectively (Northouse, 2001).
3.4 Shared leadership in virtual teamwork
A recent review of the leadership literature proposes four sources of leadership, broken down into two structural dimensions: locus of leadership (internal vs. external) and formality of leadership (informal vs. formal). In this review, Morgeson, et al (2009) describes an external leader as one that is not involved in day-to-day tasks, while an internal leader is seen as an equal within the group. A formal leader is directly assigned to be a leader (e.g., immediate supervisor, project lead, and the like), while an informal leader is described more as an advisor, someone that does not come into the leadership position by direct assignment. Shared leadership has been conceptualized in many ways (Carson, et al 2007), but the underlying theme among these definitions is that shared leadership involves the distribution of the leadership responsibilities within the team (Jackson, 2000; Lambert, 2002; Pearce & Conger, 2003), there has been some empirical research suggesting that when virtual team leaders provide evaluative and systematic feedback, there is a greater degree of team identification and commitment (Sivunen, 2006).
Shared leadership may be particularly important to virtual teams, where team member separation from the leader and from one another may necessitate the distribution of leadership functions. While the sharing of leadership has proven to be advantageous to more traditional forms of vertical leadership (Pearce, et al 2004), Klein et al (2006) found that in shared leadership work environments, teams that were more effective had leaders that were able to recognize when it was necessary to either delegate responsibilities or directly intervene to maintain high levels of performance.
Shared leadership has been defined multiple ways, but across researchers there appears to be a unified agreement that shared leadership involves team members distributing leadership responsibilities amongst themselves, without negating the possibility of vertical leadership (Pearce & Conger, 2003). As with the broader leadership literature there have been a variety of leadership behaviors and/or functions which have been argued to be the content of shared leadership (Morgeson, et al 2009). Many researchers have looked at the components that predict the success of these shared leadership behaviors and the impact it has in a variety of environments (Carson, et al 2007; Merkens & Spencer, 1998).
Shared leadership conceptualize leadership as a set of practices that can and should be enactment by people at all levels rather than a set of personal characteristics and attributes located in people in the top (Badaracco, 2001; Kouzes and Posner, 2002). Shared leadership is “a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both. This influence process often involves peer, or lateral, influence and at other times involves upward or downward hierarchical influence” (Pearce & Conger, 2003b, p. 1).Shared leadership involves a process where all members of a team are fully engaged in the leadership of the team: Shared leadership entails a simultaneous, ongoing, mutual influence process involving the serial emergence of official as well as unofficial leaders (Pearce & Conger, 2003)were included the power and influence with all members possessing significant power and exercising meaningful influence as needed in the process of performing work (Higgins & Maciariello, 2004).
The Shared leadership contrast with the model of formal one person leadership and did not take nothing about the other talent and when the principal leaves, promising projects often lose momentum and fade away once is loosed the principal brain in the story.
When the Shared leadership becomes virtual often the formal leader will not be available to these individuals as readily as other team members. In this scenario, the top leader may have the ultimate responsibility for motivation, but the reality may be that the day-to-day, minute-to-minute source of motivation is, in fact, more dispersed and shared by team members, as suggested in research by Pearce, et al (2004).
3.4.1 Shared and distributed leadership
This mean that the decisions in a team can be dispersed among some one, many, or maybe all the members the leadership is not limited to he formally leader. Nowadays many formal talks in the business schools the searchers discuss the concepts share and distributed as equal meaning but there is a real abyss between both. This change comes up only until 2002 when Gronn introduces the concept with different ontological assumption.
Shared leadership can be traced to a transition in the self-leadership, super leadership constructs (Manz and Sims 1989, 1991) from individuals self-leading, to the conceptualization of self-leadership at the team level (Neck et al. 1996).
Distributed leadership goes beyond acknowledging that multiple individuals are involved in leadership practice (termed “leader plus” or shared leadership), by also exploring the interactions between individuals and investigating the situation in which leadership is enacted (distributed leadership) (Fitzsimons et al 2011).
Distributed leadership remark more about how human cognition is both held between individuals and aspects of the situation and thus cognitive activity is stretched over both human actors and aspects of the context they are. Usually this kind of leadership is offered by developing a capacity to act by means of “concertive action”, “co-performance” or “conjoint agency” (Fitzsimons et al 2011).
Distributed leadership was shown to encompass not merely the structuring influence of numerous individuals, but three forms of concretively patterned and reproduced activity-based conduct, varying degrees of structural solidity: spontaneous collaboration, intuitive working relations, and institutionalized practices (Gronn, 2002).
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