E-leadership of virtual project teams

Introduction

Welcome to the new paradigm of work - anytime, anywhere, in real space or in cyberspace. As more people become involved in projects, and the number of projects increases, project management will become more and more complicated. That complexity increases when the project team is virtual and geographically dispersed, from different organizations and different cultures.

Companies are setting up virtual projects to share knowledge, equipment and capital. Technology is able to facilitate virtual project work arrangements. It is important to focus on the leadership challenges of the virtual project teams, as a leader can make a critical difference in team performance, and leadership is just as applicable to virtual project teams as the traditional project teams. E-leaders need to establish norms early in a virtual team's formation to maintain the appropriate level of control and encourage and recognize emerging leaders in virtual teams. Geographic or temporal distances magnify the challenges of e-leadership, and while no particular leadership style is necessarily the best for a virtual team, each project manager needs to analyze the virtual project on his or her own leadership style, and adapt accordingly by categorizing the types of virtual teams, and identifying the related issues, to help e-learners modify their own leadership style in order to be more effective in the virtual environment.

The leadership evolution

Over the past few decades, the concept of leadership has drastically changed. As we move towards globalization, more changes are soon to come. The new work paradigm in the virtual environment is here. More and more projects are implemented by virtual teams. Leadership is moving from group-centered to individual-centered. The leadership concepts are focused on directive, autocratic, or at least top-down leadership style. The boss, the “leader” manager knows the answers and what to do. The followers, the subordinates do what they are told. McGregor's Theory X assumes that workers can not think for themselves. The leader directs their efforts. Sometimes (but often not) the “leader” is superior in intellect, experience, skill, and understanding. He/she has position power, i.e. “I'm the boss. You do what I tell you.”. As the worker becomes more educated, some leaders adopt the democratic leadership style. In extreme cases, the group, the company, the project are run by committees. Knowing that extreme will not work, leaders move to the middle and adopt the participative leadership style. Zhang, (2005) highlights the relationship of directive leadership and participative in the virtual team context. In participative leadership, the leader equalizes the power and shares problem solving with followers by consulting with them before making a decision. In directive leadership, the leader provides compliance with directions for accomplishing a task.

In participative leadership the leader makes all the decisions after some consultation with workers who may be affected by those decisions. “Leadership” is synonymous with “management”. But it is actually very different. People follow managers because they have to, but they follow leaders because they want to. People work together to get things done. A “group” is only people working together. A “team” is a group of people working together towards the same goals and objectives. With the team concept, leadership is evolved into team leadership. With the concept empowerment, leadership is trickled down to the lower levels of hierarchical organizations. Some organizations start to introduce teams that operate without a separate leader guiding their work, “self-directed work teams”. Leaders with directive, autocratic leadership style will not work well in self directed teams (Herman, 2005).

The self directed teams are intact, focused, and above individuals. Instead of being team focused, the team moves towards individual focused. The work force is changing. Workers are much more independent and self-motivated. They want more control, more autonomy, more power and self-leadership. Virtual teams are more task-focused than FTF (Face to Face) teams. They have high levels of autonomy and independence. They are very similar to self-managed work teams (SMWTs). Effective management in SMWTs involves a high level of coordination, efficiency in time management, the establishment of performance goals, monitoring of the team members' performance, regular team meetings, frequent feedback, and team member training on performance monitoring. To manage these teams, the e-leadership style would be more transformational and collaborative. E-leadership may be in the form of rotational leadership, where team members take turns leading the team. The transformational e-leadership style focuses to provide clear objectives, and establish a climate of mutual trust by emphasizing the development of strong relationships with team members. The transactional e-leadership style avoids micro-management (DeRosa, 2004).

Productivity comes from knowing the objectives, having the right resources to get the job done, and are left alone to get results. Leaders will not direct or guide, they facilitate, inspire, stimulate and coach. They apply the Transformational leadership style. Zhang (2005) highlights the behavioral components of transformational leadership:

Leaders are moving towards the transformational leadership style and participative leadership style. They focus on enabling the high performance of their direct reports. They facilitate understanding of objectives, provide the resources, coach, teach, encourage, measure, and give constructive feedback. While receiving coaching, the team members may choose to collaborate for results. The leader's role is to foster in the team members the desire to perform independently, to help them to grow and achieve. Globalization and the network organization are changing the work force. Transformational leadership style will be needed in the virtual environment. Leaders will have to lead virtual teams with results-oriented leadership. In a few years, directive leadership style will be obsolete. Participative leadership style will last longer and will gradually fade away (Herman, 2005).

In project management, the leaders often have to take on the transactional leadership style. Transactional leadership is an exchange process based on the fulfillment of contractual obligations. It has three behavioral components:

The transformational leadership is complementary to the transactional leadership style and an effective leader, especially the virtual project manager, should be both transformational and transactional. In an environment of self-determination, and along with the project management perspective, transformational leaders need to set the vision, communicate the “big picture” and contract with self-motivated workers to accomplish the work. They have to coordinate the efforts of a wide range of independent workers and consortiums. These workers often are in virtual teams. The leadership style is less directive and supportive. The skills include persuasion, negotiation, sourcing, stimulating, and high levels of networking. In a virtual project, it is important to be task focused early. It allows the team to develop “swift trust”, but this trust is fragile. Swift trust proposed that e-leaders should put emphasis on performance and task-related matters. E-leadership would be required to develop an environment that build trust through reciprocity, appropriate emotional expression, and disclosure (DeRosa, 2004).

In the virtual project and virtual team context, e-leadership is leadership enabled by Information Communication Technologies and Systems. Virtual project managers apply transformational leadership and transactional leadership in managing their virtual project team. As more and more companies are enabling the virtual teams, systems are developed to provide some of the leadership functions performed by the collaborative leaders. Using ICT (Information, Communication Technologies), virtual teams are using collaborative systems to connect the virtual team members. E-leaders will manage these systems and provide the human-to-human caring (Herman, 2005). Organizations are searching for opportunities to achieve maximum impact for their participation. Leaders focus on connecting independent performers and virtual team members into networks focused on specific goal accomplishment of a virtual project. E-leaders are specialists who can aggregate widely diverse resources. E-leadership is about facilitating people to collaborate to produce results. Virtual team members work with that leader, that facilitator, because they respect the leader's leadership style of being result oriented, respecting the qualities of each individual team member, and a desire to help them grow, achieve, and fulfill their potential. This leadership style is based on caring relationships with a mutual opportunity for economic and intrinsic gain. Team members, often virtual team members, are looking for connections with their leaders.

Virtual project managers have to overcome spatial and temporal challenges. Virtual project managers must be able to perform traditional duties such as monitoring employees, providing quick and timely feedback, and resolving conflicts and other problems that might arise. Transactional leadership will be needed. Temporal distribution refers to the distribution of team members across time. By using communication media that are synchronous, e-leaders may be able to overcome the temporal distribution challenges. This is compatible with the media naturalness theory in that synchronous media that closely resembles FTF communication should be the most effective (DeRosa, 2004).

Zhang, (2005) proposed a contingency approach to e-leadership of virtual team leadership behaviors. There is no one best style of leadership. The same leadership behavior has different effects on different virtual teams. Contingency approach to leadership effectiveness is especially important in the virtual team environment. It is much more complicated than the traditional face-to-face team environment. A virtual team is often global which is influenced by additional factors such as the diverse ethnic, national and organizational backgrounds, the complexity of communication, increased temporal and spatial virtual work arrangements. The leader needs to analyze the impact of the team's internal and external environments on the e-leadership style and adapt accordingly.

Zhang, (2005) suggested that media richness mediated the effects of transformational leadership behaviors on team performance mainly through trust. The inspirational motivation behaviors of transformational leadership create a sense of mission and team identity. The sense of belonging to a team, working toward a common vision, promotes team member interaction and trust building. The transformation leadership behaviors are often expressed with emotion and personal interactions, which involve exchange of nonverbal cues. These cues convey warmth, trust and emotions. Lean communication medium, such as e-mail, cannot transmit these cues. Therefore low media richness reduces the impact of inspirational motivation on trust building.

Development and maintenance of trust are the most important factors contributing to virtual team success. As the use of technologies increases, managers and team leaders will need to trust employees even more. FTF contact is important for reinforcing social similarity, shared values, and expectations. Virtual teams can develop trust by learning to trust others when communicating. In the study of e-leadership, there has been a great deal of research comparing FTF and computer-mediated teams. The media richness theory focused on electronic communication. Communication media can be classified according to their level of richness based on their capacity for feedback, the number of cues and channels used, and how personal they are. FTF communication is classified as the most “rich,” followed by video communication, phone communication, e-mail, etc. Asynchronous communication is exemplified by a delay in feedback. As an e-leader, you have to choose the appropriate tool and be aware of the asynchronous communication that may impact virtual team development. The media readiness theory suggested that as team members became more familiar and more comfortable with media lower in richness, their perceptions toward the media continued to become more positive. It is important for e-leaders to develop the virtual team by providing its members with more experience with virtual communication and to use technological media that allow for many FTF cues (DeRosa, 2004).

Zhang, (2005) suggested that transformational behaviors such as inspirational motivation, optimism, individualized consideration, and contingent reward enhance team performance in the presence of goal-frustrating events. Goal-frustrating events are obstacles or setbacks that slow or stop a team's progress toward accomplishing their objectives. These are events such as technical problems and deadline pressures. Transformational leadership overcomes the negative affective climate, negative feelings and attitudes shared by a team, such as lowered confidence generated by goal frustrated events. Transformational leadership style promotes positive team mood among team members and foster more cooperation, more participation, less conflict, and stronger social cohesion. In a virtual team environment, leaders have to cope with more goal frustrating events, e.g. higher communication costs, communication confusion, and unfamiliarity with collaboration technology. To retain and improve team performance, virtual team leaders need to assess the negative impact of goal frustrating events experienced by the team and control the team affective climate. Inspirational motivation behavior of transformational leadership sets high performance goal, fuses each member's personal goals with the team mission, and exhorts team members to work harder. The contingent reward behavior of transactional leadership articulates performance goal, gives clear tactics on task accomplishment, and gives timely rewards. Such directive behaviors improve the team's confidence in the leader and sense of direction in face of adversity or confusion. A virtual leader is very different from traditional leader. There is a shift from leading with direct authority to an indirect authority that emphasizes coaching and training. Virtual project managers should focus on defining, facilitating, and encouraging performance. Using media naturalness theory as a guide, virtual project managers should provide training and opportunity for the virtual team members to develop collaboration experience with technological media. E-leadership would involve devising new ways to monitor team members, provide quick and timely feedback, and resolve conflicts and other problems that might arise. The spatial and temporal distances inherent in virtual teams demand that e-leadership be more focused on actual results and performance (DeRosa, 2004, p.135).

The social theories proposed that social factors, technological features, the task, and the users' environment all interact to influence virtual performance. Given sufficient time for communication, computer-mediated teams will experience the same interpersonal interaction as FTF teams. Temporal factors such as the length of time a team works together play an important role in team relational development and impact team performance (DeRosa, 2004).

Virtual Cross-value-chain, Creative Collaborative Teams (VC3 teams):

In E-leadership of a virtual project team, we do not want the people who are the “best available”. We want the best and the brightest that the company has to offer, i.e. the people who are the “best able”. If they are the best, they are already involved in many internal company projects. The only way we can engage them is through a virtual team. Everyone works on the virtual project from his or her desktop. The virtual team members can remain available to both their parent organization and the virtual team. The Virtual Cross-Value chain collaborative Creative teams (VC3 teams) are essentially focused SWAT teams. Their members have little history working together. They are brought together to create innovative solutions on a part-time basis and then disbanded. If inter-organizational creative teams are hard to lead, and if virtual teams in general are hard to lead, then VC3 teams are even harder (Malhotra, 2001).

E-leadership needs effective electronically-mediated communication, collaboration, and coordination. The key is to have a shared understanding among team members about the problem, norms (of knowledge capture, sharing, and use; of work distribution; and of roles and responsibilities), and context for interpreting knowledge. The virtual teams that have such a shared understanding usually require that members start with a common set of norms, context, and problem definitions. They have worked together previously, or they have worked in the same organization, product line, industry, or discipline. For virtual teams with no shared understanding when the team is initiated, the shared understanding must be created (Malhotra, 2001).

The Case of Boeing-Rocketdyne

This case illustrated the success of collaborative leadership of a virtual team, using computer-mediated collaborative technology to develop a radically new product. The team was a (Virtual C3 team). It was inter-organizational and virtual, and had to compete for the attention of team members who also belonged to collocated teams within their own organizations. This case identified the successful leadership practices and developed recommendations for virtual project managers responsible for such teams (Malhotra, 2001).

The VC3 team at Boeing-Rocketdyne was called SLICE for Simple Low-cost Innovative Concepts Engine. Boeing-Rocketdyne is a major manufacturer of liquid fueled rocket engines in the United States. The SLICE's business objective was to be able to drive the cost of a rocket engine down by 100 times, be able to get the engine to market 10 times faster and to increase the useful life of a rocket engine by a factor of three. In the beginning, none of the senior technical managers at Rocketdyne thought that it was possible. Only one advanced program manager was willing to try it. This suggested that this program manager believed in transformational leadership.

The key participants in the SLICE team included eight people from 10 miles to 100 miles away: a project team leader, concept designer, lead engineer, combustion analyst, and thermal analyst (from Rocketdyne); a manufacturability engineer and CAD specialist (from Raytheon), and a stress analyst (from MacNeal-Schwendler). They were picked to work on the team because of their highly valued (world class) expertise in their specialty disciplines. They were leaders in their disciplines. Team members from Raytheon and MacNeal-Schwendler, as well as the project leader, did not have rocket engine design experience. The team did not share a common understanding of the rocket engines design process. The team members had never worked together. They did not have a common set of norms for coordinating. The team worked for 10 months with no team member devoting more than 15% of his or her time. Since time was precious, the team decided to minimize travel for face-to-face meetings. The only time that all members were collocated at a team meeting was the last day of the project at the final technical review and celebration. The team received training in the collaborative tool in the one-day kickoff session. Only six of the eight members were present. To lead a project like this one, the project leader required a collaborative, participative and transformation leadership style.

The team's challenges

The SLICE team:

SLICE Team: The Success Story

The team successfully:

Through the Case of Boeing-Rocketdyne, (Malhotra, 2001) the management practices that seemed to contribute to the success of the team were identified.

Using this case, we can identify, and apply the e-leadership style to support virtual project teams.

Setting Strategy of the team

Prior to the conceptualization of the SLICE team, the key stakeholders engaged in a series of discussions and negotiations to establish an agreement. Through this agreement, the companies and their employee developed trust and common understanding of this collaborative venture. This agreement was a result of many verbal agreements among the management team. These agreements had much to do with trust and understanding between similar-level managers at the partner companies. To create the trust, the agreement defined how the risks were to be managed in each company and to handle the project responsibilities. The agreement created a team statement of work which was not decomposed into tasks specific to each company. There was only one team budget. The agreement forced the responsibility and associated budget on the entire team. The work was allocated to all team members and allowed them the discretion to reallocate resources as needed across organizational boundaries. Every activity was placed in the context of the total project scope and budget. This forced collaborative leadership in all members of the team (Malhotra, 2001).

Enable Collaborative Technologies - Knowledge Management Technologies

The team's collaborative technology was developed to suit the team. It allowed secured access from anywhere; to create, comment on, reference-link, search, and sort entries. These entries consisted of sketches, snapshots, hotlinks to desktop applications, texts or templates, and an electronic white board that allowed for near-instantaneous access to the same entry. The team created a coordination protocol to enable collaborative use of the technology early. It provided immediately accessible single source of both product and process data for all enterprise-wide activities associated with the project. With the protocol the team developed, the team was able to work with others without face-to-face discussions, sharing information from a need-to-know basis to sharing all information with everyone on the team all the time. The team was able to modify the communication protocol, develop a new norm to suit the project and the team. With collaborative leadership, the team was a self managed team which can work effectively together virtually. Knowledge was being shared without face-to-face discussions (Malhotra, 2001).

Restructure Work process

While work processes had to be restructured to accommodate the virtual nature of the collaboration, the work processes had to fulfill the three core requirements:

Create a Shared Understanding

To create a shared understanding within a creative team, the team discarded the centralized leadership around the lead engineer, who determined what needed to be shared about what. Since a single repository was being used to hold all the information, team members became knowledgeable about all the information concerning the project that had been entered. The lead manager adopted a participative leadership style. All members of the team fully participated in all aspects of the design. The team developed a common language for brainstorming. To accelerate the development of shared understanding, the team created the “shared artifacts” quickly. Each team member evaluated each design for its likelihood of meeting the functional requirements of each analyst's area of expertise (Malhotra, 2001). Instead of having clearly defined objectives and tasks, the team was able to come up with innovative solutions with ever changing tasks. The team created a shared understanding specific to the team. Team roles were flexible to respond to emerging tasks, problems, and solutions. The team changed the leadership from spoke-in-the-wheel coordination (with lead manager/engineer in the center) to democratic coordination.

Engage in Frequent Interaction

In co-located teams, the best discussions occurred spontaneously based on frequent interactions. In the virtual environment, the team replaced one-on-one conversations with frequent all-team conversations. To facilitate frequent posting and review of entries, the team leader forced the use of the collaborative technology for all file-sharing and information-sharing; for example, project management plans, status reports, budgets and cost sheets, meeting agendas, meeting announcements, and meeting minutes. In this case, the team leaders utilized the directive leadership style, set and enforced the standard. Transformational and collaborative leadership styles were applied to foster the continuous sharing and documenting. The team was less concerned about the completeness of entries and more concerned about sharing entries. Instead of each “engineer” accepting a work assignment, working it to its end, assuring its correctness, and preparing a presentation, team members presented their ideas and sketches, relying on past experience and expert judgment. The more detailed analysis followed when ideas stabilized (Malhotra, 2001). Frequent team discussions helped to develop trust.

The team developed and used “common-language” metaphors to foster communication and common understanding. It developed communication protocols about what gets communicated to whom, when, and how specific for the project. This fostered frequent and spontaneous interaction. By coupling use of a knowledge repository with synchronous and frequent virtual discussions, one-on-one discussions were promoted when the need arose, but results were documented for everyone

Create Knowledge

Participative and collaborative leadership promote common understanding and discussion. The process encourages members to enter incomplete ideas, artifacts. It also fosters discussion and generates context specific knowledge and sharing. This promotes collaboration and team spirit (Malhotra, 2001). The team promoted minimal cataloging of new information and timely and frequent discussions of new entries in knowledge repository to enable members to learn the context. Through knowledge sharing and creation, the team worked together and developed trust.

The team was able to function successfully because it changed its work processes to meet its needs. The core needs did not change just because the team was virtual and inter-organizational. The ways to achieve theses needs would change. New practices were needed in setting the strategy, in designing technology that evolved with the team's needs, and in identifying work processes that facilitated the project. Strategic practices needed to be put into place before the work or technology practices were initiated. The dependence on the technology and coordination protocol required that the technology needed to be in place before the team's work process started. The technology should be modified to suit the team's work processes. The team needed to devote effort to establish its work practices (Malhotra, 2001).

VC3 teams are the next generation of virtual teams that can reduce costs and time, increase in quality, increase flexibility, and create new knowledge competencies. Global and knowledge-intensive competition will make it imperative to pool the intellectual capital of employees across organizations and geographical distances, and that increasing time demands are making it difficult to do so through the traditional mode of face-to-face collocated teams. The success of such teams will require not just applying technology, but, more importantly, setting up appropriate inter-organizational strategy and work processes flexible enough for the team (Malhotra, 2001). This will require collaborative and transformational leadership.

Conclusion

The e-Leadership of Virtual Project Teams has to overcome communication, spatial and temporal challenges. Virtual teams will gradually evolve to self-managed work teams (SMWTs) such as VC3 teams. The success of theses teams can be attributed to the transformation of e-leadership style from directive and autocratic to transformational and collaborative. Instead of micro-management, the leadership style should be more transactional. Instead of building trust by face-to-face interactions, e-leadership build trust by developing an environment that is task focused to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration.