Digital Commons Network^™

The Correlation Between Leadership Performance And Personality In Virtual Technology Workers, Henry C. Mullins

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This quantitative correlational study examined the relationship between leadership performance and personality traits among leaders in the technology sector, who work across the spectrum of virtuality. Personality traits were measured using the Big Five model: extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, using the IPIP-NEO-60 instrument. Leadership performance was measured using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) and interpreted through both the Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and Transformational Leadership theories. Holistically this is viewed through a Transformational Christian worldview. This study also examined the role of virtuality, defined as the extent to which an individual works from an office or remotely. Participants were …

Distributed Team E-Leadership: A Phenomenological Inquiry Into Subordinate Perceptions Of Career Development, Coby Andrew True

Theses and Dissertations

As changes in the global economy coupled with fast-paced advancements in technology continue to evolve and merge, the need to deploy a distributed workforce becomes increasingly important to remain competitive. Just as managers adapt traditional leadership styles to meet the needs of the distributed environment, individual team members must also overcome the challenges of increased geographic proximity, or physical distance between team members and team leader. As distributed teams continue to become more prevalent in the work environment, adaptations of traditional leadership styles must evolve to account for the unique conditions. The increasing use of Advanced Information Technology (AIT) has …

Addressing Virtual Work Challenges: Learning From The Field, Julia Eisenberg, Aparna Krishnan

Organization Management Journal

Companies increasingly rely on virtual teams. Despite numerous studies examining the challenges of geographically dispersed work, the findings are often mixed. The purpose of this article is to identify themes of challenges associated with virtual collaborations based on academic literature and do a gap analysis with industry trends. First, we identify five overarching categories of virtual team challenges based on reviewing the latest trends in the academic literature: trust and relationships, communication and knowledge sharing, perceptions and decision making, leadership, and diversity. Second, we utilize these categories to qualitatively code and analyze the company data from the Fortune Best Places …

E-Leadership And Leader-Member Exchange Strategies For Increasing Nonprofit Virtual Team Productivity, Nichole Guerra

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Nonprofit leaders often place new employees with little experience in challenging virtual team settings, where they are expected to meet increased service demands. Productivity failures reported in the 2015 State of the Nonprofit Sector survey revealed that 76% of U.S. nonprofit agencies experienced increased demand for services in 2014, while 52% were unable to meet those demands. Based on the e-leadership and leader-member exchange (LMX) theories, the purpose of this descriptive, single case study was to identify the leadership strategies used by nonprofit midlevel supervisors to increase productivity of virtual teams containing new employees in Colorado. A purposeful sampling method …

A Study On The Success Of Group Formation And Cohesiveness In Virtual Teams Using Computer-Mediated Communications, Eliel Melon, Yair Levy, Laurie P. Dringus

CCE Faculty Articles

While the Internet is a major business tool nowadays, individuals are still challenged to form team s and collaboration virtually. To evaluate the success of team formation in a virtual setting, this research study assessed the role of different computer – mediated communications (CMC) employed on the success of team formation measured by task performance (TP), team cohesiveness (TC), computer skills (CS) and social bond (SB), while assessing the differences on such relationships when controlled for gender, age, education level, academic major, as well as academic year. This research used analysis of variance (ANOVA) and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to …

A Study Of The Success Of Group Formation In Virtual Teams Using Computer-Mediated Communications, Eliel Melón-Ramos

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

In the digital domain, virtual teams within organizations and corporations are becoming common. Restructuring an organization or corporation is vital because competition and globalization are increasing. In this era of globalization, distributed working groups need to develop a competitive advantage in these ever-changing environments. Historically, teams had experienced problems stemming from geographical and temporal limitations. With the increase of technology in telecommunications, organizations are increasingly forming virtual teams, which have become critical to the survival of nearly any corporate entity.

Virtual teams have some of the same problems that regular teams have. One of the key challenges is the method …

Business Leadership Education: A Virtual Storytellers Exercise, Maria Mendez, Yue Cai Hillon, Khadija Al Arkoubi

Management Faculty Publications

Online courses are becoming popular in business education and require creative strategies to maintain students’ engagement and facilitate contextual and complex understanding of class concepts and theories. In this paper, we are proposing an exercise for online undergraduate Organizational Behavior courses to motivate students and enhance their understanding of class concepts through the use of storytelling. In this exercise, students work in teams to narrate stories that describe with rich detail different concepts and theories pertaining to team management in general and virtual team management in particular. The results suggest that students develop a higher level of critical thinking in …

Where's The Boss? The Influences Of Emergent Team Leadership Structures On Team Outcomes In Virtual And Distributed Environments, Marissa Shuffler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The influence of leadership on team success has been noted extensively in research and practice. However, as organizations move to flatter team based structures with workers communicating virtually across space and time, our conceptualization of team leadership must change to meet these new workplace demands. Given this need, the current study aims to begin untangling the effects of distribution and virtuality on team leadership structure and subsequent team outcomes that may be affected by differences in conceptualizing such structures. Specifically, the goals of this study were threefold. First, this study investigated how the physical distribution of members may impact perceptions …

My Guild, My Team: Applying The Technology Capabilities Of Massively Multiplayer Online Games To Virtual Project Teams, Dawn Owens, Deepak Khazanchi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Millions of people are playing Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), a computer game genre where thousands of players interact daily in highly complex virtual world environments. These players self-organize, develop skills, and acquire various roles. MMOGs appear to mirror the complexity of the business context while offering unique technology capabilities that appear to encourage group participation and emergent leadership. Managing a remote workforce across different time zones, geography and culture requires effective virtual collaboration and management of communication, coordination challenges and control issues. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the unique technology capabilities of MMOGs and propose …

The Effect Of Personality And Trust On Virtual Team Effectiveness, Eugene A. Pierce

Student Scholarship

Many organizations, such as the Department of Defense (DoD), are using virtual teams to meet the challenges of working globally. These teams are faced with unique challenges due to geographical distance. Literature suggests that trust is especially important in a virtual environment and that team leader personality is suggested to impact team member trust (Handy, l995; Cohen & Bailey, 1997). The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between team leader personality, team member trust and perceived team effectiveness in virtual teamwork. Participants in the study included 873 virtual team members within a combined government (DoD) and commercial …

Collaboration Engineering In Distributed Environments, Halbana Tarmizi, Matt Payne, Cherie Noteboom, Chi Zhang, Lucas Steinhauser, Gert-Jan De Vreede, Ilze Zigurs

Research & Publications

Collaboration in distributed settings has become a reality in organizational life, yet we still have much to learn. One important area of study is the integration of Collaboration Engineering (CE) in distributed, or virtual, teams. Collaboration Engineering offers promising guidelines for process structure, but its application in distributed environments is just beginning to be studied. We conducted a study in the design science tradition with the goal of examining whether and how the principles and techniques of Collaboration Engineering can be taken into a distributed setting. We report on the design, development, and feasibility test of a prototype environment that …

Technical And Environmental Challenges Of Collaboration Engineering In Distributed Environments, Halbana Tarmizi, Matt Payne, Cherie Noteboom, Chi Zhang, Lucas Steinhauser, Gert-Jan De Vreede, Ilze Zigurs

Research & Publications

Collaboration in distributed settings has become a reality in organizational life. Yet we still have much to learn about issues inherent to distributed collaboration. One important area of study is the integration of Collaboration Engineering in distributed virtual teams for helping them in structuring their interaction. The field of Collaboration Engineering offers promising guidelines for process structures, but its application in distributed arenas is just beginning to be studied. We report on the design and development of a new collaboration environment for the incorporation of Collaboration Engineering principles, as well as the results of an initial study that examined leadership …