Since virtual teams are supported by technology and technology tends to filter out vital nonverbal cues, can a leader be effective in virtual contexts? This is one of the questions that I have tried to answer in my past research. I have found that leadership can indeed make a positive difference in virtual contexts. I have also found that certain technology features, such as anonymity, can make the effects of certain types of leadership more powerful in virtual contexts. More recent research adds to these results and shows that when a team leader displays transformational leadership behaviors, the effects of these behaviors are more powerful in virtual teams than in face-to-face or same-place teams.

In this post, I cover the following:

• What is transformational leadership?
• Recent findings about the effects of transformational leadership in virtual teams.
• What do the findings mean?
• Can you become a transformational leader?

What is transformational leadership?
Transformational leaders influence their followers by transforming the basis of their motivation. Transformational leaders motivate others by engaging their intrinsic interests (e.g., being associated with a particular cause) as opposed to engaging their extrinsic interests (e.g., salary or pay) (see Betsy’s post on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation). Specifically, such leaders employ four different types of behaviors or 4I’s to influence others: inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, and idealized influence. Inspirational motivation involves articulating an exciting and compelling vision to followers as well as highlighting team identity and teamwork. Intellectual stimulation involves challenging assumptions and helping followers re-frame old issues in new and creative ways. As part of individualized consideration, a transformational leader pays attention to the situations and needs of individual followers and helps them develop. Idealized influence involves modeling the behaviors that a transformational leader expects the followers to carry out.

Recent findings
During the last few months, a couple of papers focusing on transformational leadership in virtual teams have appeared in well-respected journals. One of them, by Aparna Joshi, Mila Lazarova, & Hui Liao, found that inspirational leadership (a combination of inspirational motivation and idealized influence) promoted team members’ trust in others (within their team) and their commitment to the team. Additionally, this effect of inspirational leadership became stronger the more dispersed the members of the team were. In other words, inspirational leadership had a more profound effect on trust and commitment in a team whose members were highly dispersed than in a team whose members were in close proximity to each other.

The second paper, by Radostina Purvanova and Joyce Bono, found that the effect of transformational leadership on team performance was stronger in virtual than in face-to-face teams. The authors studied the effects of same leaders in both virtual and face-to-face settings, thereby controlling for differences in effects that could be attributed to inherent qualities of individual leaders rather than their behaviors.

What do the findings mean?
The findings reported by the above papers fly in the face of those who think that technology and distance make it challenging for a leader to motivate others and enable teamwork. With the right kind of leadership, a leader should be able to influence team members even more strongly in a virtual context than in a face-to-face context. Part of this ‘right kind of leadership’ is transformational leadership.

A variety of reasons have been offered to suggest why transformational leadership has a more powerful effective in a virtual rather than a face-to-face team. One of the reasons has to do with the virtual context hiding individual differences among team members and enabling a transformational leader to increase the focus on team identity. Essentially, since members of a virtual team don’t have visual information about other team members, they pay less attention to individual identities and become more sensitive and responsive to team identity cues provided by the transformational leader (see an earlier post in which I have discussed this at length). In such a context, team members work for the good of the team and engage in greater levels of teamwork.

Can you become a transformational leader?
My own experience with coaching virtual team leaders as well as formal evaluations of training programs have shown that it is possible to train leaders to be transformational. Along with my colleagues, I have prepared an online training program designed to help virtual team leaders be more transformational and improve the performance in their teams. This training program is comprehensive in that in also helps virtual team leaders display not only transformational behaviors but also other behaviors that research has shown to be critical for improving virtual team performance. I plan to release the training program on this site in the near future. In case you are interested in learning more about it, please feel free to contact me – use the following template to construct my email address: myfirstname@leadingvirtuallydotcom.