Seeing Remote Team Members as Leaders: A Study of US-Scandinavian Teams

Virtual teams enable knowledge workers from around the globe to participate in a variety of projects through computer-mediated interactions. Given that many of these virtual teams, including those involved in open source software development and other systems development, may not have preassigned leaders, it is important to understand the factors that explain why an individual may be considered a leader by team members in other locations. Specifically, the factors information systems development (ISD) ability, contribution, knowledge transfer, and team cohesion are hypothesized to influence remote leader emergence in distributed ISD teams. The proposed model is tested in a study using ISD teams composed of student members from both the US and Scandinavia. ISD ability, contribution, and knowledge transfer in cohesive teams were found to be significant predictors of remote leadership emergence. The study also suggests that US and Scandinavian members do not use the same criteria for identifying remote team members as leaders and offers a theoretical explanation of the results.