Virtual Leader of a Virtual Team: He or It?

Virtual teams tend to rely on electronic communication and information technology to accomplish their tasks. The progress of information technology has made the development of a virtual leader possible. Thus, the emergence of virtual leaders has become an interesting issue for researchers when focusing on virtual teams. In this study, a 106-team experiment adopted the theory of substitutes for leadership by replacing human leaders with computer systems to examine the effectiveness of virtual leadership. The results indicated that a virtual leader could be important, particularly as regards certain routine tasks. In addition, we believed that if the leaders of virtual teams would behave more proactively, their team members could perform better.

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