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
Author’s note: Project Wonderland has now “forked, ” and the original team led by Nicole Yankelovich has branched off to work on Open Wonderland. Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts… Read more →
Email is one of the most used technologies in virtual teams. This week’s digest focuses on email, for which I noticed an increased focus in the media. The increased focus may be due to large technology companies, such as Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., coming together about a week ago to fight information overload – a problem to which email… Read more →
What: Wall Street Journal article (also available at Yahoo Finance!) about embarrassing moments during virtual meetings. Posts to which it is related: Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology Bottom Line: Be mindful of the embarrassment that you may create for yourself if you don’t learn about and manage the technology (e.g., web meetings, video-conferencing, telephone-conferencing) that you are using for… Read more →
As more companies are considering the option of allowing their employees to telecommute (see the recent flurry of news about telecommuting), there is an increasing need to understand how leading in virtual teams is different from leading in face-to-face teams. In many cases, people have challenged the idea that leading in virtual teams is different from leading in face-to-face situations…. Read more →
The unexpected results from our studies comparing virtual team collaboration in virtual worlds to that in instant messaging (see previous post in which we discussed this) have prompted me to rethink the value of virtual worlds for virtual team collaboration. I have so far been focusing on the potential of virtual worlds to add value during the collaboration event itself…. Read more →
What: Wall Street Journal article “Managers Learn to Bond with Remote Workers.” Posts to which it is related: Virtual Teams – Beneficial or Detrimental, Manipulate Perceptions to Improve Virtual Team Performance, Implicit Communication and Culture: What it Means for Leading Virtual Teams, Building Trust in Virtual Team Bottom Line: Article indicates that it is becoming more critical for managers to… Read more →
What: Rochester Democrat & Chronicle article titled “Supervising a virtual team is still all about basics.” Posts to which it is related: Overcoming Virtual Team Challenges: After Action Review, Building Trust in Virtual Teams Bottom line: The article talks about three things needed to manage virtual teams: (1) Communication – share all relevant information with the team and use appropriate… Read more →
What: Chief Learning Officer article on leading in the digital age. Posts to which it is related: Controls in Virtual Teams: The Case of Boeing, Culture Matters in Virtual Teams, Building Trust in Virtual Teams, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology Bottom line: The article reports results from a survey of 247 executives conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership… Read more →
I have been thinking about what one can do in virtual team meetings conducted in virtual worlds to make participants feel and react as if they are face-to-face with other participants. Part of me says that this is an “ideal” that we may never reach. At the same time, I am aware of research (more) indicating that it is possible… Read more →
The LeadingVirtually.com team would like to start a new feature on our blog. Periodically, we plan to post a digest of news and articles that we come across and which we believe might be interesting to our audience. Our focus will be to keep you up to date on recent news, findings, or reports related to virtual teams. We… Read more →