Empowering Leadership and Effective Collaboration in Geographically Dispersed Teams

Empowering Leadership and Effective Collaboration in Geographically Dispersed Teams

Instructions/Descriptions

[Order Now]

Empowering, Leadership, Effective, Collaboration, Geographically, Dispersed, Teams

PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY 2016, 69, 159–198

Empowering Leadership and Effective Collaboration in Geographically Dispersed Teams

1. Sharon Hill The George Washington University

Kathryn M. Bartol University of Maryland

Our research integrates theoretical perspectives related to distributed leadership in geographically dispersed teams with empowering leadership theory to build a multilevel model of virtual collaboration and performance in dispersed teams. We test the model with procurement teams in a major multinational corporation.

Our results show a significant cross-level effect of empowering team leadership, such that under conditions of high empowering team leadership, a team member’s virtual teamwork situational judgment (VT-SJ) is positively and significantly associated with his or her virtual collaboration behaviors and also indirectly with his or her individual performance in the team.

At the team level, our findings also suggest that the impact of empowering leader- ship on team members’ aggregate virtual collaboration, and indirectly on team performance, increases at higher levels of team dispersion. These findings shed important light on the role of team leadership in fostering effective collaboration and performance of geographically dispersed virtual teams.

To support major strategic initiatives in areas such as globalization, outsourcing, and strategic partnering, organizations are increasingly turning to the use of geographically dispersed teams in which members rely on technology to collaborate virtually in the team.

Dispersed or virtual teams offer many potential advantages (Martins, Gilson, & Maynard, 2004; Rosen, Furst, & Blackburn, 2006), including the ability to have the most technically qualified individuals work on tasks regardless of location while also offering opportunities for sizable cost savings resulting from reduced travel.

With such potential benefits, it is small wonder that organizations have an increasing interest in the utilization of such teams (Martins et al., 2004; Rosen et al., 2006). At the same time, reports point to special challenges individuals face in their collaborations with dispersed

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to N. Sharon Hill, The George Washington University, School of Business, 315F Funger Hall, 2201 G Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052; nshill@gwu.edu.

C© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. doi: 10.1111/peps.12108

159

160 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY

team members (for reviews, see Axtell, Fleck, & Turner, 2004; Martins et al., 2004; O’Leary & Cummings, 2007). For example, research shows that geographic dispersion may impede effective information sharing, co- ordination, problem solving, building trust, and constructively resolving conflicts with others on the team (Cramton, 2001; Cramton & Webber, 2004; Hill, Bartol, Tesluk, & Langa, 2009; Hinds & Mortensen, 2005; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Joshi, Lazarova, & Liao, 2009; O’Leary & Cummings, 2007).

In the face of such challenges, numerous scholars have pointed to the potential importance of team leaders in promoting virtual collaboration that contributes to high levels of performance in dispersed teams (e.g., Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Blackburn, Furst, & Rosen, 2003; Malhotra, Majchrzak, & Rosen, 2007; Martins et al., 2004; Weisband, 2008; Zigurs, 2003). In their major theorizing about leadership in dispersed teams, Bell and Kozlowski (2002) suggested that the challenges of collaboration in such teams and the attendant difficulty in monitoring team member behaviors require distributing leadership functions to team members while, at the same time, fostering collaboration among them.

Yet the limited existing empirical research related to distributed forms of leadership in dispersed teams has focused on leadership as it relates to use of infor- mation and communication tools in teams (e.g., Rapp, Ahearne, Mathieu, & Rapp, 2010; Surinder, Sosik, & Avolio, 1997; Wakefield, Leidner, & Garrison, 2008) and/or failed to consider geographic dispersion in the team (e.g., Pearce, Yoo, & Alavi, 2004).

One form of leadership that embodies Bell and Kozlowski’s (2002) recommended approach is empowering leadership. Due to its combination of sharing power with team members while also providing a facilitative and supportive environment (Arnold, Arad, Rhoades, & Drasgow, 2000; Srivastava, Bartol, & Locke, 2006), empowering leadership appears to be particularly well suited to helping team members meet the demands of collaborating in a dispersed teamwork environment.

Hence, the over- all purpose of this study is to evaluate the extent to which distributing leadership to team members by way of empowering leadership promotes more effective virtual collaboration and ultimately performance in dis- persed teams. We define virtual collaboration as collaborative behaviors that promote interactions that support geographically dispersed teamwork.

In their theorizing, Bell and Kozlowski (2002) noted that distributing leadership functions to dispersed teams creates an environment that fa- cilitates each team member applying relevant knowledge and judgment in order to successfully collaborate virtually with other team members. This is paramount in dispersed teams because each member faces chal- lenges unique to his or her local dispersed circumstances. Further, as a result of being separated from others in the team, each team member must

HILL AND BARTOL 161

regulate his or her own behaviors and performance in the team. Accord- ingly, taking a multilevel approach, we examine the extent to which an empowering leadership team context moderates the influence of individual virtual teamwork situational judgment (VT-SJ) on team member virtual collaboration, and ultimately team member performance.

VT-SJ reflects Bell and Kozlowski’s (2002) emphasis on each member of a dispersed team having “attributes to be able to . . . operate in a virtual environment” (p. 26). As such, VT-SJ describes an individual’s knowledge about suc- cessful virtual collaboration strategies and how to apply that knowledge to formulate effective responses in geographically dispersed teamwork situations.

Existing research related to individual characteristics in dispersed teams has largely been concerned with relatively stable personality characteristics or personal orientations that either adversely influence or aid computer-mediated interactions (e.g., Staples & Webster, 2007; Tan, Wei, Watson, Clapper, & McLean, 1998; Workman, Kahnweiler, & Bommer, 2003).

Our focus on VT-SJ responds to calls for greater attention to the role of individual differences in dispersed teams (Kirkman, Gibson, & Kim, 2012) by examining a characteristic—knowledge and judgment about operating effectively in dispersed team situations—that can potentially be developed.

In addition, we extend leadership research that goes beyond the existing predominant focus on team-level effects to consider how team leadership, as a team-level stimuli, might have cross-level effects on im- portant individual-level processes in teams (e.g., Chen & Kanfer, 2006; Chen, Kirkman, Kanfer, Allen, & Rosen, 2007).

Building further on Bell and Kozlowski’s (2002) theorizing about dispersed team leadership, we argue that empowering team leadership will play a more important role in fostering the virtual collaboration and performance of the team as a whole as geographic dispersion in the team increases.

This is because the challenges of collaborating virtually can be expected to intensify as the level of team dispersion increases (O’Leary & Cummings, 2007). This line of inquiry adds to the limited research that has explicitly measured geographic dispersion in con- junction with leadership effects in dispersed teams (for exceptions, see Cummings, 2008; Gajendran & Joshi, 2012; Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014; Joshi et al., 2009).

At the same time, it contributes to emerging leader- ship research that seeks to shed light on situations in which empowering team leadership is more or less effective (e.g., Chen, Sharma, Edinger, Shapiro, & Fahr, 2011; Mathieu, Ahearne, & Taylor, 2007; Yun, Faraj, & Sims, 2005).

In summary, we build a theoretical model that makes three important contributions to research on dispersed teams as well as empowering leadership research. First, we contribute to theory on leadership in geographically dispersed teams (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002) by integrating

Professional Plagiarism Free Paper in APA/MLA/Harvard/Turabian Format, Instant Delivery, High Quality Submissions, 100% Unique, Turnitin Report Attached

PLACE THE ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET A PERFECT SCORE!!!