آگاهی از عملکرد IT و رفتار رهبری خودگردان در تیم های مجازی IT-enabled awareness and self-directed leadership behaviors in virtual teams

1. Introduction Virtual teams are commonly employed in organizations and across industries (Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014; Wakefield, Leidner, & Garrison, 2008). Virtual teams, which comprise geographically dispersed members holding diverse expertise and perspectives, are established to meet challenging market demands (Cramton, 2001; Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014). Virtual team members communicate predominantly via information technologies (ITs), are assembled on an ad-hoc basis to solve complex problems, and are often disbanded after completion of the assigned project (Gibson & Gibbs, 2006). In self-managed virtual teams (henceforth known as virtual teams), members are responsible for defining and regulating their own work processes and do not have formal leaders assigned (Cramton, 2001; Gilson, Maynard, Jones Young, Vartiainen, & Hakonen, 2015; Malhotra & Majchrzak, 2014). There are various types of virtual teams, such as inter-organizational teams, and distributed ad-hoc task groups (Espinosa, Slaughter, Kraut, & Herbsleb, 2007; Gilson et al., 2015; Malhotra & Majchrzak, 2014). The prevalent use of virtual teams in organizations has attracted significant research (see Gilson et al., 2015 for a review of virtual team studies). Most studies focus on the dynamics and outcomes of virtual teams (Chidambaram & Tung, 2005; Cramton, 2001; Gilson et al., 2015; Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014). Previous research has shown that swift trust established through communication sets a positive tone and develops trust among team members (Gilson et al., 2015). However, other work has indicated that virtual team members are unresponsive, experience deindividuation and engage in social loafing (free-riding on others’ efforts) due to reduced visibility (Alnuaimi, Robert, & Maruping, 2010; Chidambaram & Tung, 2005; Cramton, 2001). In a virtual team setting, the significant lack of social contextual cues and uncertainties regarding one’s partners increases the tendency toward misunderstanding and misinterpretation (Cramton, 2001; Gilson et al., 2015). For example, the lack of a physical working context in a virtual team reduces the ability of team members to comprehend the task constraints faced by remote partners, impeding the development of a common ground (Rico, Sánchez-Manzanares, Gil, & Gibson, 2008). In these ways, organizations face challenges in motivating virtual team members to exhibit and manage their leadership behavior. Despite these concerns, virtual team leadership research has generally ignored what motivates individual members to engage in self-leadership within their team (Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014; Stewart, Courtright, & Manz, 2011). The focus of virtual team leadership research has been on shared and emergent leadership. Self-leadership, a facilitator of shared leadership (Houghton, Neck, & Manz, 2003), encompasses how individuals manage their own leadership behavior in a team, and it is an important means to reduce process losses and facilitate team effectiveness (Houghton et al., 2003; Stewart et al., 2011). Shared leadership involves individual team members undertaking distributed or overlapping leadership responsibilities and roles, as members influence one another in their efforts to collaborate (Houghton et al., 2003). Team members need to self-lead by deciding when to step in; when to step back; and when to enhance, modify or eliminate certain leadership behaviors during collaboration efforts based on the work situation (Stewart et al., 2011). A team level approach to shared leadership, which involves aggregating the leadership of all team members, however, may cloud such important nuances (D’Innocenzo, Mathieu, & Kukenberger, 2016). An individual lens is important too. Moreover, in the context of virtual teams, existing shared leadership research primarily examines the outcomes of shared leadership.