Identifying Potential Leaders for Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are becoming more common work structures because specialized knowledge is often geographically distributed. The performance of virtual teams can be increased through effective leadership. Although a growing body of research exists that has identified behaviors exhibited by effective virtual team leaders, we know relatively less about the characteristics of workers or their prior experiences that make them more likely to exhibit these behaviors. Our research seeks to address this gap by examining how the prior technological and interactional experiences of leadership candidates is related to the leadership behaviors that they exhibit during virtual team work. Our results indicate that prior experience working in virtual teams, particularly with the technologies that support the virtual work, are the most significant factors that predict leadership behaviors. Our results have implications for improving current leadership training programs and for providing effective leadership in existing virtual teams.