Surinder Kahai is an Associate Professor of MIS and Fellow of the Center for Leadership Studies at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton.
He has a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay), an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Michigan.
Surinder has an active research program on leadership in virtual teams, computer-mediated communication and learning, collaboration in virtual worlds, CIO leadership, and IT alignment. His research has been published in several journals including Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Group & Organization Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management Information Systems, Leadership Quarterly, and Personnel Psychology. He is currently serving on the editorial boards of Group and Organization Management, IEEE-TEM, and the International Journal of e-Collaboration. He co-edited a Special Issue of Organizational Dynamics on e-leadership and a Special Issue of International Journal of e-Collaboration on Virtual Team Leadership.
Surinder has won numerous awards for his teaching, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Surinder has spoken on and consulted with several organizations in the U.S. and abroad on the topics of virtual team leadership, e-business, and IS-business alignment, and IS strategy and planning
According to Harvard’s Richard Hackman, a leading expert on teams, there is a widespread belief that teams make us more productive and creative and that they are the best way to get a job done. In a May 2009 Harvard Business Review interview, Professor Hackman cautions us that problems with coordination, motivation, and competition often cause a team to perform… Read more →
The April 2009 issue of the Communications of the ACM, a highly respected journal, published an article by Jay F. Nunanamker, Bruce A. Reining, and Robert O. Briggs on ‘Principles for Effective Virtual Teamwork.’ The authors derived these principles from their decade long experience of working with hundreds of virtual teams. I present these principles and also provide links to… Read more →
A while back, Betsy blogged about paradoxes in virtual work. Yesterday’s NY Times had an interesting article that illustrates another paradox. Basically, virtual work can both decrease and increase visibility. Since virtual workers can be located anywhere, they are not visible to their managers. However, since virtual workers conduct a significant part of their work on or via information and… Read more →
Last week’s Time had an article on how President Obama is using the science of change to transform the country. Specifically, President Obama and his economic team are relying on findings in behavioral economics to make people break old habits and adopt behaviors that are better for them and society. Unlike traditional economics which assumes that human rationality, self-interest, and… Read more →
What: LA Times article about President Obama conducting a virtual town hall meeting to reach out and connect to Americans Posts it is related to: What President Obama Teaches Us For Leading Virtually Bottom line: President Obama continues to be innovative in embracing technology to engage his constituency, the people of America. Last week, he hosted a virtual town hall… Read more →
In response to my last post (Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging), Andrew Meyer of ‘Inquiries Into Alignment‘ commented about the problem of getting contributors. He points out that the number of active bloggers within a firm is typically low. In fact, in one of the research papers that I included in my post, the authors found that in a… Read more →
Blogs have been around more than a decade now, but corporate blogging, or the use of blogs within firms, is still limited. From my teaching of business executives and professionals, I believe that this is probably due to a general lack of understanding of blogs and how they can improve social relationships and task performance. In this post, I focus… Read more →
What: Research article on communication in virtual product development teams Posts it is related to: Freeing Yourself from Email, The Evolution of Harmful Email Habits, How do I begin to Improve the Functioning of my Virtual Team? Bottom line: The authors of the article studied members of virtual teams engaged in new product development. Responses from 184 team members spread… Read more →
What: Financial Times special report about the current downturn offering opportunities for distributing leadership and the use of flexible virtual teams Posts to which it is related: What President Obama Teaches Us For Leading Virtually, So Far And Yet So Near, Leading Virtual Communities: Do We Have the Answers, Are Casual Virtual Team Participants Endangering Virtual Teams Bottom line: According… Read more →