People: Engage and Support Virtual Teams

Project Communication Management

People: Engage and Support Virtual Teams

The move to remote working is a great opportunity for a project team to revisit the fundamentals so as to ensure everyone understands the team objectives, their specific roles, and how each team member contributes to the final results. Leaders need to clarify the goals of each member to stay focused on crucial tasks.

Many virtual project teams perform better when leadership is shared (rather than centralized with the formal team leader); however, team leaders are often neither prepared to identify shared leadership potential nor to actually share leadership responsibility. Based on a study of 96 globally dispersed software development teams, we show that team leaders tend to underestimate the team's capacity to lead themselves. As a consequence, these leaders monopolize decision-making authority and provide insufficient levels of autonomy for team members to tackle their tasks. Preventing the team members from unfolding their true potential, these leaders unconsciously jeopardize virtual team performance. Paradoxically, it is thus team leaders themselves hindering leadership effectiveness in virtual teams.

Enabling Shared Leadership in Virtual Project Teams: A Practitioners' Guide

Strategy 1: Accept the New Rules of the Game

Traditionally, team leaders are assumed to obtain higher status than the average team member. After all, the traditional mindset has it that the leader has superior knowledge of how the task should be conducted. Although this might work in a co-located setting, where team leaders can personally oversee everyone’s project work, in a virtual team, geographic dispersion puts tight limits on team leaders’ awareness of all team members’ task statuses and any signs of upcoming issues. Likewise, in co-located teams, team members could count on team leaders directly helping out (both in terms of general guidance and more detailed task work).

In virtual teams, however, team leaders have to accept the new reality of their limited awareness and influence, creating the necessity to rely more on their team members (and for them to be more self-reliant). For many seasoned leaders of co-located project teams this new mindset, necessary for virtual teams, is in stark contrast to what they may be used to. In our research, however, often we have witnessed that virtual teams are not just “more difficult” co-located teams, rather they are a different kind of work organization, requiring a different set of roles for both team leaders and members. Thus, it all starts with accepting the new rules of the game.

Strategies for Enabling Shared Leadership

Strategy 2: Respect Team Members’ Competencies

The classical distinction between team members and the team leader implies that team members possess technical skills, but not necessarily leadership skills. However, many of the highly qualified members of virtual teams tend to possess both the cognitive ability and the motivation to consider the larger project objectives (rather than just their work packages) and help lead the team toward accomplishing them. Moreover, dispersed teams often consist of team members that are leaders in their specific realms themselves. Hence, accepting and valuing team members as the source of leadership behavior enables the team leader to identify the true potential of the team.

Strategy 3: Encourage Leadership Behaviors

Often, leadership is understood to be whatever the appointed leader does; however, research has shown that there are crucial behaviors that successful leaders apply, such as anticipating team members’ information needs, considering task interdependencies, and initiating decision-making and implementation processes. Even further, these behaviors can be shared by the team members. Team leaders who understand that there are certain leadership tasks that need to be addressed and that these can be shared among the team members can actively look for these behaviors during task accomplishment. That is, formal team leaders should actively address and encourage team members to engage in such activities, considering not only their own work packages, but at the same time considering how all work packages are interlinked. In essence, team leaders should shape a broader role profile for team members, including shared leadership responsibility.

Strategy 4: Loosen the Reins and Avoid the “Responsibility Trap”

This step follows directly from the previous one. It is critical for team leaders to provide autonomy to team members and include them in decision making. However, because team leaders are generally held responsible for team performance by their superior managers, they often aim at maintaining control of the decision-making process. Moreover, providing autonomy to team members is thus often seen as increasing the team leader’s vulnerability. This is what we refer to as the “responsibility trap.” Team leaders caught in this trap may encourage leadership behaviors in their teams, but they may still fail due to leader-centered decision making. Team members quickly catch on to such inconsistencies and refrain from shared leadership, no matter how much it is encouraged.

Strategy 5: Becoming a True Team Member

The last step in adjusting your leadership to the peculiar challenges of virtual teams is becoming a team member by actively participating in the team’s shared leadership. In many companies, team leaders fail to provide necessary autonomy when they underestimate their teams’ shared leadership.

Copyright Information

Author

Hoegl, Martin | Muethel, Miriam

ARTICLE Decision Making, Teams, Leadership 1 February 2016

Project Management Journal

How to cite this article:

Hoegl, M. & Muethel, M. (2016). Enabling shared leadership in virtual project teams: a practitioners' guide. Project Management Journal, 47(1), 7–12.

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Virtual meetings also need preparation. This does not just mean setting up the technology, but making clear the purpose of the meeting, the objectives which need to be achieved by the end of the meeting; a timed agenda; and finally, how actions will be documented and followed up after the meeting.

Project Communication Management