Leading Effectively: What is your Global Management Style?

February 25, 2009

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Drawing on five years of research and project analysis, Burtha and Connaughton (2004) pointed out several practices of effective virtual leadership. These included the need for face-to-face events to build an environment of trust, communicating often and through multiple media outlets, establishing and reinforcing roles and responsibilities, providing structure and process, understanding and respecting cultural differences, and expecting and embracing change.

Leadership practices have also been examined with respect to different phases of virtual teams. Beranek, Broder, Reinig, Romano, and Sump (2005) identified four project phases and the leadership processes that should take place in each phase for project success. In the pre-project phase, leaders need to select team members and communicate the project mission, priority, and success criteria. In the project initiation and mid-term phases, leaders need to establish and manage team boundaries, develop shared mental models, and manage communication processes. In the wrap-up phase, leaders need to annotate successes and address lessons learned.

The requirement to be a team constrains our research domain. Learning networks, communities of practice, Web-based interest groups, and other loosely formed collectives are not real teams. Communicating with others electronically does not transform a collection of people into a team. Teams must have real tasks to perform, interdependent members, and shared outcomes.

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