Leadership styles and their effect on the structure of communication response patterns among global virtual teams

The goal of this paper is to examine the overall structure of different response patterns of global software learning teams and understand how these response activities are affected by different types of leadership arrangements (i.e., emergent versus assigned leaders). Results from a two-semester study with 24 teams enrolled in global software development courses at Universities in Turkey, Panama, and the US reveal that the presence of different team leadership arrangements resulted in differences in the communication response patterns among group members. Assigned leader groups tended to show more distributed communication response patterns than those teams with Emergent leaders. Moreover, the communication responses within Assigned leader groups tended to be more directed toward non-leaders than those that occurred within Emergent leader groups. Finally, results of this study indicate that Assigned leader groups tend to develop a very different structure of communication than that which occurs in Emergent leader groups.