Living with Inadequacy and Guilt: Leadership in Global Virtual Teams

LIVING WITH INADEQUACY AND GUILT: LEADERSHIP IN GLOBAL VIRTUAL TEAMS

Johanna Saarinen Aalto University Finland December 2013

Paper for XII International Studying Leadership Conference Rome 14-16 December 2013

1. INTRODUCTION

As organizations have become global and more de-centralized, geographically and organizationally distributed work has turned into a common way of doing work. In response to the challenge of globalization and increasing customer demands, organization are rapidly supplementing team structures with virtual ones: when a few years ago it was calculated that around half of the workforce is collaborating virtually, it is now projected that within a few years, more than 1.3 billion people will work virtually (e.g. Gratton and Johns 2013, Kelley and Kelloway 2012). The current economic crises will certainly intensify and accelerate the trend, when cost savings and travel-budget cuts will be imposed by the global financial crisis.

Virtual work has necessitated that managers are increasingly required to lead individuals they rarely see. According to recent studies on virtual work, the most important challenge and success factors of the virtual work should be addressed into leadership (Jonsen et al., 2012; Zander et al. 2012, Sinclair 2010; Zimmerman et al. 2008). Leading a virtual team is challenging, and especially when the team is distributed around the globe: team members work across temporal and spatial boundaries, often in the absence of face to face interaction, towards a common goal, and from different locations. Therefore leaders’ possibilities to communicate and influence their employees in virtual environment differ from physical context.

Although the ability to lead people virtually is no longer an option but a requirement for success, it seems that the virtual forms of organizing work are surfacing more quickly than scholars are able to study them, research on virtual team leadership, in particular, is lagging behind (Zander et al. 2013, Kelley 2012, Malhotra et al. 2007). Although virtual work is now more common in almost all organizations, particularly empirical research is inadequate. We easily assume that managerial work and leadership is basically similar in collocated and virtual environment, but earlier research has shown a number of differences which emerge in virtual leadership. However, we need more knowledge and empirical studies on how virtual environment is changing leadership, what are the leadership challenges and potential barriers. In addition, we need deeper understanding what leaders do when managing their people in a virtual context.

This empirical study tries to understand leadership in virtual context, describing how virtual environment has changed leadership, and how this is experienced by managers. The focus is on aspects which potentially make leadership different in virtual environment. This study will also describe the challenges and barriers of virtual leadership, and how they impact on leadership work. The empirical data for the study has been collected in a global company, in which most people work in the virtual environment in their everyday work. This empirical study uses qualitative interview data to find out how managers work with their virtual employees, what are their daily practices and interactions when they attempt to survive and succeed in virtual teams. 2. LEADERSHIP IN VIRTUAL TEAMS IN THE EARLIER RESEARCH

Understanding leadership in a virtual context

There is no lack of research and literature in the field of leadership and management, and to be able to understand leadership in virtual context, we need to elaborate how we explore leadership in this study. In most conceptions of management and organization, leadership has a given and central place in enforcing principles, motivating employees and communicating visions and goals. The field of leadership studies has traditionally been leader-centered, i.e. focusing on the individual leaders and their traits, abilities, styles and behavior. There have been different schools and streams to determine successful leadership from various perspectives, such as personality traits, situational perspective, or leadership as interactions. Central to the argumentation on leadership as a series of interaction process, has been a distinction between transactional or transformative leadership, later launching also shared and distributed perspectives on leadership (see Crevani et al. 2010, 77- 78).

This paper adopts the perspective of leadership trying to describe leadership in terms of practices and processes organized by people in interaction (see Crevani et al. 2010). This means that although leadership has been described in this study as what managers do, the focus is not on leadership styles and behavior, but in the practices and their daily work. In this study, leadership is defined as a social phenomenon which is built together with a leader and employee. Therefore, the focus is on the leadership practices and activities, and on the interactions between a leader and employees. Therefore, leadership is not understood only as a straight relationship between the manager and the employee, but as a dynamic setting.

How to define virtual leadership, how is it different from collocated, traditional leadership? According to majority of the current scholars (e.g. Zander et al. 2013, Kelley and Kelloway 2012, Hambley et al. 2007), virtuality forms a totally new context for leadership: leaders cannot lead virtually the same as they do in face to face situations. Multinational and multicultural environment increases the challenges and differences. The existing literature reflects the view that leadership in virtual global context differs significantly from leadership in traditional, physical context. Virtual leadership has been seen even as fundamentally different and definitely more complex than traditional leadership and thus requiring different mindset, behaviors and strategies (e.g. Wakefield et al. 2008, Colfax et al. 2009), and even a new paradigm.

Kelley and Kelloway (e.g. 2012 and 2006) have been studying virtual (remote) leadership for one decade, and investigated the relationships between leadership factors, behaviors and perceptions of leadership. They have studied the relationship of these factors to individual outcomes in an environment characterized by physical distance and reduced face to face interaction between employees and their leaders. They refer this situation as “remote leadership” and claim that relationships are differentially related to the context in which they occur: proximal versus remote. Kelley and Kelloway (2012, 2) used mixed method study of remotely led workers and identified, tested and refined several factors that may act as antecedents: perceived control, unplanned communication, regularly scheduled communication, and prior knowledge of leader. They also developed a model of remote leadership on four contextual elements: perceptions of control, prior knowledge of leader, unplanned communication, and regularly scheduled communication with leader. They tested this model on remote and proximally managed employees with a web-based survey trying to find out whether remote and proximal groups differ significantly. Their study provides strong evidence for the argument that the remote environment requires a new model of leadership, different from those based on the premise of face to face interaction. Their findings suggest that in remote environment, context matters by influencing perceptions of transformational leadership. They suggest that in the remote environment, context is so omnipresent that it filters the way in which individuals perceive and interpret leaders’ behaviors; the remote context is also fundamentally different from the environment in which the majority of leader-employee relationships have ever been conducted. (Kelly and Kelloway 2012).

Virtual leadership can be defined depending on the origin and the perspective of the virtual work. In addition to virtual leadership, researchers use the concepts e-Leadership, referring to leaders who conduct many of the processes of leadership largely through electronic channels (Annunzio 2001; DasGupta 2011; Zaccaro and Bader 2003); or d-leadership, referring to the distance the individuals and team members are located. Also the terms mobile leadership or remote leadership have been used in the recent studies (e.g. Kelley and Kelloway 2012). In all cases the members in a virtual team communicate and coordinate their work mainly via electronic media. Similarly, also leadership in virtual context happens mainly through different forms of technology. In this paper the focus is not on leaders’ behavior or leadership style, but on practices and experiences. Here, virtual leadership is defined as leading and managing employees who are dispersed over multiple locations, specifically multiple countries, and collaborate predominantly virtually, through technology. In addition, terms managers and leaders have been used abreast, not emphasizing difference between the words manager or leader.

Defining virtuality and virtual teams

The attribute “virtual” designates to distributed work that is predominantly based on electronic information and communication tools (e.g. Hertel et al. 2005). When it was first used in the context of computers, “virtual” applied to things simulated by the computer. Virtuality in an organizational context is the use of virtual space to facilitate interactions relating to organizational activities, it enables access to resources and capabilities that may not be available in the same physical space and could be geographically dispersed. Shekhar (2006) provides a model for virtuality that accommodates the major manifestations of virtuality in an organization: it can manifest itself in different ways, as telework, e-learning, virtual teams, outsourcing or off-shoring, virtual communities, virtual linkages, electronic market places and technology-facilitated business activities.

Virtual organization has been defined as an environment in which workers are not physically but electronically connected. Virtual work or virtualized work (Gratton and Johns 2013) can be differentiated depending on the number of persons involved, the degree of interaction between them, the outcomes, and the degree of virtuality of the team (e.g. Griffith and Neal, 2001). In addition, numerous factors characterize a virtual environment, e.g. geography, culture, time zone, work practices, organization and technology (Chudoba and Watson-Manheim 2005).

The earlier literature describes virtual leadership mostly in virtual teams. Virtual teams have become commonplace where various groups of people are facilitated into uniform factions, share common organizational goals, and are linked together through technology (e.g. Davis and Scaffidi, 2007). Two characteristics distinguish virtual and conventional teams: (1) spatial distance and (2) technological mediation: information, technology and personal communication. Global virtual teams, commonly abbreviated as GVTs work across time and space as well as organizational and cultural boundaries. Global virtual teams can be defined as groups of people who (1) work together using communications technology, (2) are distributed across space, (3) are responsible for a joint outcome, and (4) work on strategic or technically advanced task, and (5) are multifunctional and/or multicultural (Jonsen et al. 2012; Maznevski and Chudoba 2000). Specific for global organizations, virtual teams consist of people best suited for the task, work close to the customers, and are independent of their geographical location (e.g. Gibson and Cohen 2003). Global virtual teams are real multicultural settings, but without the benefits of the rich interaction context offered by collocation (Zander et al. 2012). The earlier literature describes virtual teams often as short term, project teams or temporary teams (e.g. Verburg et al. 2013). However, majority of current virtual teams are permanent, and they work together long term even if some members might change now and then. It is also typical for global virtual teams that team members are likely to represent different specialist functions and to have multiple reporting lines, working in the matrix organization. This means leadership is potentially more difficult, because it requires collaboration, cooperation, co-ordination and commitment with the team to whom the manager does not have direct report lines.

Themes and aspects to study leadership in a virtual context

The recent research highlights several challenges and aspects leading global virtual teams. These challenges are described as rather straightforward leaders’ actions, such as maintaining communication, establishing relationships, managing conflict, influencing people, and building trust. The earlier literature has studied virtual leadership through several themes: how to build virtual teams (e.g. Gibson and Cohen 2003; Malhotra et al. 2007; Nijstad, 2009); leadership effectiveness and team performance (e.g. Powell et al. 2004, Purvanova and Bono 2009, Symons and Stenzel 2007, Neufeld et al. 2010, Joshi et al. 2009, Chen et al. 2011); communication and trust in virtual environment (e.g. Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1999; Crisp and Jarvenpaa 2012; Malhotra et al. 2007), conflict (Hinds and Bailey 2003; Hinds and Morftensen 2005), well-being and stress in world-wide virtual work (e.g. Nurmi 2010), environmental aspects of virtual work (Colfax et al. 2009), workplace isolation (e.g. Mulki and Jaramillo 2011) and innovations in virtual teams (Gibson and Gibbs 2006). Certain components and themes have consistently been shown as pivotal in describing the leadership challenge in global virtual teams: trust, knowledge sharing, commitment, conflicts, and well-being in virtual teams. The focus of this study is to look at these themes through leadership lenses, concentrating on what managers do, and on possible challenges what leaders experience.

Building trust

The major disadvantages of virtual teams are the lack of physical interaction -with its associated verbal and nonverbal cues- and the synergies that often accompany face to face communication. These deficiencies raise issues of trust. Generally trust means reliance on another person or entity.

Researchers have suggested that trust and commitment may be the key mechanisms by which employees can overcome physical distance and work towards accomplishing shared team goals and enhance team effectiveness (see Fiol and O’Connor 2005, Hinds and Mortensen 2005, Wilson et al. 2006). There is general agreement among scholars that virtual teams are vulnerable to dysfunctional conflict when team members are unfamiliar with one another. In face to face environment it is easier to build and sustain relationships and assess them members’ motivation and trustworthiness, and that virtual work stresses the importance of trust as the foundation for performance in a virtual environment (e.g. (Symons and Stenzel 2007, 6, Chen et al. 2011, Järvenpää and Leidner 1999, Lipnack and Stamps 1997, Symons 2003). Trust is critical in a virtual team because the members of virtual teams need to be sure that all others will fulfill their obligations and behave in a consistent, predictable manner (Cascio 2000; Järvenpää and Leidner 2002). Developing trust, relationships and loyalty to groups takes time, which is often quite limited in the context of global virtual teams (Mockaitis et al. 2012). Regarding the context of virtual team, Handy (1995, 46) summarized the main challenge in communication via technology: “trust needs touch”.

Knowledge sharing

Communication and knowledge sharing are complex factors in global virtual teams in which leader and employees communicate mainly via technological device and don’t see each other often. Communication is usually based on electronic channels like phone, emails, video meetings etc. Existing research suggests that electronic communication is generally inferior to in face to face teams (Purvanova and Bono 2009, Fiol and O’Conner 2005). This is due to lack of media and channel richness and to the delayed feedback inherent in some communication technologies (e.g. Maznevski and Chudoba, 2000), also nonverbal cues are reduced or lost, potentially resulting misinterpretation (Antoniakis and Atwater 2002, Avolio et al 2001, Hambley et al. 2007). In addition, communication quality and quantity differ in virtual leadership: electronic communications are perceived as less warm, and email-messages contain higher levels of negativity than face to face communication (Berry 2006, Kurtzberg et al. 2005, Kelley and Kelloway 2012).

To understand leadership and communication in virtual work, Purvanova and Bono (2009) have summarized communication theories, which claim that face to face communication is superior to computer-mediated communication. The reasons are the following: face to face communication is richer in nonverbal and paraverbal cues, it minimizes information loss due to the simultaneous usage of multiple communication channels, it maximizes feelings of social presence and conversational involvement, and it transmits information about social standing and social context (Purvanova and Bono 2009, 344). They also claim that virtual communication can be expected to have an overall negative effect on leadership behaviors, as well as on follower’s perceptions of leadership behavior (Purvanova and Bono 2009, 345). This was also found in the studies of Zander et al. (2013), in which knowledge sharing was shown as critical success factor and leadership challenge. Zander (et al. 2013) ask how global team leaders can virtually facilitate knowledge transfer and the creation of such mutual understanding, when the richness of the communication context is by necessity compromised? Cultural aspects of virtual team collaboration and knowledge sharing have risen to an important challenge in global virtual teams, and according to the recent research, the failures in virtual communication are often linked to culture and language (e.g. Klitmoller and Lauring 2013; Mockaitis et al. 2012). Global virtual teams operate almost always in multicultural settings, in which the cultural differences are registered broadly (Brett et al. 2006). Individuals from different cultural backgrounds may have different beliefs, values, attitudes, competencies, hierarchy, and perceptions of priority. Similarly, the term cultural difference is defined as dissimilarities in core values, beliefs, customs and rituals, as well as in legal, political and economic systems (e.g. Adler 2008, Evans et al. 2011). It’s also important to recognize that strong organizational cultures and processes can moderate, but not eliminate, the influence of national culture.

Commitment

Researchers have suggested that commitment is among the key mechanisms by which employees can overcome physical distance and work towards accomplishing shared team goals and enhance team effectiveness (see Fiol and O’Connor 2005, Hinds and Mortensen 2005, Wilson et al. 2006). To achieve the goals and strategic objectives of the company, people need to be committed to their work, and to the company. According to Meyer and Herscovitch (2001), commitment is “a force that binds an individual to a course of action of relevance to one or more targets”. Klein et al. (2012) proposed that commitment is one of a variety of bonds or attachments that a person can develop in the workplace. People with higher organizational commitment have a sense of belonging and identification with the organization that increases their desire to pursue the organization’s goals and activities, and their willingness to remain a part of the organization (Meyer and Allen 1991).

Powell et al. (2004) determined the antecedents to commitment in a team, and compared how antecedents to commitment differ between collocated and virtual teams. Using survey data of 52 teams, they found that member efforts are significantly related to trust among collocated team members but not among virtual team members. In addition, virtual teams had stronger relationships between work processes and trust, and between trust and effective commitment. They call for more research to understand commitment in virtual work.

Commitment can be built in a paradoxical way in virtual organizations. The findings of a study by Crossman and Lee-Kelley (2004) indicate that relationships require clear commitment to enable the development of trust as a basis for longer-term partnership. They show that low commitment from the organization to the individual leads to low trust and team effectiveness is inhibited; yet organizational efficiency in dispersed teams requires high mutual commitment, high trust. They emphasize the need to appreciate that commitment is central to the psychological understanding between the organization, the manager and the individuals. Golden and Veiga (2008) examined how working in a virtual mode alters the impact of superior-subordinate relationships on important work outcomes. The impact of this relationship was significantly affected by the extent of virtual work, demonstrating the important roles of supervisory relationships in determining the commitment, job satisfaction and performance of virtual workers. In terms of organizational commitment, their findings suggest that there is an organizational upside and downside to extensive virtual work. On the upside, individuals who work extensively in a virtual mode and have high quality relationship with their managers are likely to demonstrate significantly higher levels or organizational commitment. However, for those who have a low quality exchange relationship, the downside of extensive virtual work is a significant reduction in commitment (Golden and Veiga 2008, 85). According to Jacobs (2006), management practices form a sense of organizational attachment, and in their study in a remote team of teleworkers, the communication options are limited not only by distance and reduced frequency, but by wide variations in work schedules, job locations and client environments. Their findings suggest that virtual communication is not necessarily key to the development and maintenance of commitment.

Conflict

Mannix et al. (2002) have studied conflict in virtual teams, and examine the antecedents to productive conflict management: lack of common social identity and increased diversity. With these factors conflict has the potential to be considerably more disruptive to the virtual team than to more traditional teams. They suggest that the major factor in the success of failure of virtual teams’ performance will hinge on the way they manage conflict. (Mannix et al. 2002). In addition to individual conflicts, intra-group conflicts (Paul et al. 2005, Wakefield et al. 2005) are also potential in virtual teams, especially because of diversity: members come from varied cultures and backgrounds. Discussing virtual team conflicts, Wakefield et al. (2005) suggest different roles that virtual team leaders must effectively employ to reduce various forms of virtual team conflict. They suggest that communication technologies are effective in reducing task conflict, and process conflict may be abated in the virtual team if the leader performs as a coordinator of activities. Griffith et al. (2003) remind us that virtual teams are not sentenced to increased conflict. They suggest that managers given appropriate resources, they can construct their environment so as to reduce unsolved process conflict.

Well being and stress

Virtual work has brought several benefits and flexibility to organizations and their managers, but the greater need for flexibility has brought also issues, because “the world is always awake”. Virtual work enables working online, and “anywhere, anyplace and anytime”, which in practice means longer days for managers in global organizations.

Nurmi (2010) studied “world wide stress”, and the results reveal the unique stressors of distributed work. According to her study, geographical distance, electronic dependence and cultural diversity hinder the information flow and task coordination, and create stress-evoking ambiguity and uncertainty. Prolonger work hours due to synchronous computer-mediated communication, email overload, and frequent travelling to face to face meetings are everyday issues in virtual organizations. Therefore it is not a surprise that ability to productively handle stress has been suggested as one of the main competences for virtual managers (Tyran and Tyran 2003). Nurmi (2010) suggests that good self-management skills in coping, efforts in setting clear limits and prioritizing tasks should be better supported by organizations.

Summary on the earlier literature

Knowledge sharing, trust, commitment, conflict and well-being appear in earlier studies as pivotal themes when we look at virtual work through leadership lenses. This list is not exhaustive, however, but the majority of the earlier research focuses on these aspects and challenges of virtual work when describing virtual and remote leadership. As the literature and interest in virtual teams is growing rapidly, new topics appear and are discussed. For example, technology, known as an enabler of virtual work, has been studied recently especially in the school of sciences, and there are interesting findings about technology being an enabler but also an inhibitor and complication in virtual teams. In addition, as presence is nowadays brought strongly to leadership discussion, we may ask “what is virtual presence”? It is also important to remember that all these themes become entangled with each other and cannot be sepatared.

3. METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY

The research method used in this study is qualitative. The focus of qualitative method is to describe, translate, decode and come to the terms with the meaning, not the frequency of phenomena, the focus is also on ordinary behavior (Van Maanen 1982). Qualitative approach offers also tools to research and describes the phenomenon under investigation from various angles and in depth (Ala-Suutari 1999). Qualitative data are appealing for several reasons: they are rich, holistic and have strong face validity, they also allow for the emergence of serendipitous findings and make significant theoretical advances possible (Miles 1979). This study adopts a qualitative design based on individual, narrative, and semi-structured interviews. The case company is a company operating in technology industry. The company has its headquarters in Finland and operations in 1000 locations worldwide, in more than 50 countries with 40.000 employees. Grown by acquisitions, the subsidiaries have in history been independent and strong, with strong local and national culture, operating mostly according to their own processes and practices. In the 2000s the global processes have been created to align and harmonize the operations across the company. The company operates in a matrix organization in which teams are formed of people whose competences and locality make the best combination to serve the customers and to implement the strategies. Excluding the local team leaders, the managers work predominantly in a virtual setting communicating in virtual meetings, conference calls and several virtual contacts. This is typical especially for global managers whose organizations are dispersed around the world. These managers have been the main focus of the empirical study of this study.

To collect a broad empirical data for this study, interviews and observations in a sample of twenty-five people were carried out. The sample included team leaders and managers, such as professional development managers, solution sales leads, vice president in technology, vice president of logistics, head of project management, and head or field and technical training. All interviewed people worked in virtual organizations. Most of the interviewed managers had also a virtual manager located in some other country. All informants worked in a manager position having 2-16 employees reporting to them. In the interviews I asked managers to tell about their daily work with their employees, asked them to describe the daily activities and practices, what they do, and what their possibilities and potential challenges in virtual environment are. Particularly I tried to find out through which themes and aspects they speak about leadership in a virtual context in their work.

The interviews were audiotaped in informants’ workplace and sometimes observed them at work. I learned about their daily work, how they interact with their employees, particularly through technology including phone, voice mail, conference call, email, videoconferencing, chats, lync, skype, live meeting, as well as face to face. All of the interviews have taken place in Finland. It was most common to meet in an office, or sometimes during lunch in a coffee shop or in restaurant. The interviews were semi-structured and developed over the discussions and according to the managers’ stories. About 50 hours of interviews were analyzed relating to the questions. Names attributed to the quotations from the interviews in this chapter are pseudonyms to provide anonymity. The quotations have been translated from Finnish to English, and edited and cleaned up in such a way that they still include word-for-word what was said, but are easier for the reader to follow.

I have also spent a lot of time with interviewed managers working with them for several years. I share the experience of virtual managers as being both a virtual manager and virtual employee myself. There would be no point in trying to exclude these experiences and the time I spent in these companies as something “outside” the research process. I also consider myself in some ways a subject in this research, because I share some of the informants’ experiences (for a similar setting, see Kiriakos 2010).

4. FINDINGS

In this study I try to learn about how leadership plays out in virtual environment, the focus of the study being in leadership practices and interactions. I have done this by gathering empirical data from studying what managers do and experience in their daily work. Being a team leader is different compared what it used to be. Global virtual team leaders have to lead from a distance without daily face to face contact to their employees. Although communication technology has been rapidly developing and enables virtual work, there are still numerous people challenges. The pivotal challenges and themes which were described above, raise also from the stories of managers: trust, knowledge sharing, gaining commitment, solving conflicts were topics which the interviewed managers raised up when they spoke about their leadership, and described what in leadership has changed because of virtual work. They saw that virtual environment has changed leadership from many perspectives and describe these in their interviews.

Trust is needed in leadership to create relationships, good interaction and to get the work done. The empirical findings of this study show that trust is more difficult to build when managers cannot meet their employees face to face, especially because the lack of physical presence and non-verbal cues. All managers of the empirical study raise trust as one of their biggest challenges in a virtual work. They perceive the issue of trust as a fundamental element in their leadership, and in a virtual environment distance between manager and the employees makes the difference.

The managers of this study were working in different kind of virtual teams, particularly from the perspective of distance and the degree of diversity. Most managers told it is not the length of the distance, but the distance itself, which affects their practices regarding building trust. However, it is naturally easier and cheaper to arrange face to face meetings with employees in the same country. Common to all participants of the study was that they emphasized the need to meet face to face to build the trust, preferably in the beginning of cooperation. This was said to be mandatory, and managers experienced that “good” leadership is not possible without trust and trust is not possible without meeting face to face. They need to see the person, their body language, the personality, and the gestures of their employees. However, trust can, and will later develop virtually. It was also emphasized that to have trust, it is important to learn to know your employees. The longer you had been working with them, the easier virtual collaboration was. To learn to know their people, managers tried to improve their communication by keeping actively in touch, developing systematic communication schedules, and arranging face to face meetings as often as possible (weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually, depending on the situation and locations of their employees). In all cases of this study, trust seems to need physical interaction, at least in some amount. This was expressed in many ways:

“ You cannot manage your people if you have never seen them, why, to build the trust, you start to build relationship by meeting your people, I need to see the body language to understand them.” (aah)

Trust is an important factor in virtual work as a manager needs to trust his employees without a possibility to control the work physically. Several managers told about the risks of virtual work and admitted it is sometimes problematic to control and follow-up the work, especially because of the lack of face to face time.

“The risks are bigger if we meet seldom face to face. I lose the touch, somebody can fake through the picture, if I lose the touch, I become suspicious, I wonder how the guy is doing his job, there is a credibility gap then… trust is antecedent in the virtual work, you need to show trust strongly to your people, to give freedom, to treat them as adults, openness is the key in building trust, we have tried to develop a culture of trust”

Trust shows as a crucial element in virtual leadership generally, but meeting people face to face is even more crucial in some cultures than others. For example in Chinese culture, it is nearly mandatory to meet a person physically to create trust. The managers of this study frequently mentioned Asian cultures when talking about trust. They expressed this by describing how it has taken time and specific actions to build trust to their Chinese employees:

“With Chinese people virtual leadership is working well, but only if you have first established the relations non- virtually. It is essential that you have met face to face, that’s how you create trust, then you can operate, but there is no way it can work if you have never met face to face.” (atp) “If you have not met face to face, a Chinese sees the situation as being on unknown waters, Chinese people perceive the world through human relationships, differently from others, you need to embrace a personal relationship, otherwise your Chinese employee does not know what is the mettle, if he is like-minded, who he is, what is my relationship to him.” (ars)

The prevailing assumptions about trust in distributed, virtual teams claim that trust is difficult to attain in a virtual context. The finding of this study show that trust can develop over time, even to levels comparable to those in face-to face teams over time. The informants of this study described that trust is possible to attain and it develops gradually, but it needs time, physical interactions, particularly in the beginning, and in especially in some cultures, and practices to get to know your employees.

Knowledge sharing

Virtual work has obviously changed leadership in terms of communication, as leadership is a lot about communication. Communication and knowledge sharing in virtual environment are more complex, because people communicate through technology and many cues are missing. According to the findings of this study, managers see a risk in knowledge sharing and if the message gets across. They describe daily meetings in which they ponder if people have understood topics correctly, and if the information has been sent out and received as intended. They have invented several practices and processes to improve their communication and disclose that regularity, systemic, ground rules and structure are critical for successful virtual communication. In addition, numerous tools have been developed to for virtual world, and these tools facilitate manager’s work. For example, in the case company the managers used regularly different kind of social media to collaborate with their people and to find out their location, work situation and potential problems. Chat, social platforms, and skype are also used as tools for knowledge sharing: team members tell each other about the projects they are working on, customer visits, daily discussions and issues.

Cultural differences and language problems increase the challenge in knowledge sharing. In some cultures words convey one’s intention, while in other cultures, the context and interpretation of the message provides cues which are as important as words. Similarly, in some Asian countries there isn’t basically a word for no. When you meet the person, and hear him saying yes, you can see him shaking his head and see his refusal even from his body language, but he is saying yes. In a virtual communication, you cannot see these nonverbal cues. The interviewed managers described several situations with disconnections

“The challenge is to deliver the message and get things done correctly. When the answer is yes Jari yes, yes, I know they have not understood about anything. Then I start with different words and ask them to repeat. Chinese and Indians are the worst. They are always far-off, and the accent is so strong that I don’t understand them. I have been thinking how to make them understand, and to work according to the processes.” (ajk)

Generally, we still often assume that technology enables excellent conditions for virtual leadership. However, the tools are not interactive enough yet, the interviewed managers claimed that proper contact through virtual tools is still a challenge. In addition, the physical location, in which manager is physically present, and in which most team members are located, dominate the meetings in many ways, and virtual members feel themselves external and outsiders, and might have limited opportunities to participate in the discussion.

Commitment

Attaining commitment is vital for managers to ensure their employees engage to their work, to achieve the business goals and to get the work done. When asking from the managers of this study about their work in a virtual context, they raised commitment as one of the most important challenge in a virtual work. The empirical data shows that virtual commitment and influence seem to be the biggest challenges in manager’s work. This is also heard when asking the managers what are the critical points in virtual work, what they see as most difficult to implement virtually. The managers seem to prefer FtF communication when they want to ensure commitment, they want to see and feel the commitment. In addition, they want to show their own commitment: “I always want to have the one to one meetings physically, I want to show they are important to me and that I am committed, if I call them from my car, it doesn’t show my commitment.”(atp)

Commitment appears to be one of the key themes managers mention frequently when talking about preferring FtF meetings. Managers reported they have difficulties to recognize commitment virtually, they want to see from people’s eyes if they are committed or not. They told they try to be physically present to ensure commitment: “When I need to get commitment, to influence to my people, I arrange a face to face meeting, also if there are changes around, and if I am not sure how this person is doing, I need to see physically if he has personal problems…” (bts)

” I want to be physically present when we have topics such as changing the direction, I want to have commitment, to create bond, we are then staring at each other's eyes, lyncs and other meetings are more follow up, from time to time I physically need to see that things are done as agreed”. (arh)

Again, regarding commitment, the cultural differences play an important role. Depending on the cultural background, people have different expectations regarding how the work is to be managed and organized. In a Finnish culture, for example, people usually commit to the decisions and express their thoughts rather easily. In Asian cultures communication is not always as straight-forward. One typical situation according to the interviewed managers is when an employee in China or India says “yes” when asked if he agrees to a plan, but later the manager finds out that he is only confirming he understands the plan but is not ready to work on it.

”Commitment…there are cultural challenges…if I think the previous year, I thought often how to express my views to different people, I have been considering my own knowledge about people, also the business habits differ from country to country. I thought that if we have agreement, people are committed, but then heard from my people that they will not operate according to the agreement, and I thought they are committed.” (ane) ”How to get people to do what is needed, well, Chinese, I send them an email and expect comments, it often happens that the meeting is done, everything is ok and everybody says yes, but then nothing happens, or is done totally wrong.“ (ajv)

In addition, the matrix organization and the reporting lines create challenges to commitment in global virtual teams. When employees report to the direct manager and in the matrix with dotted line to another, typically virtual manager, the roles and responsibilities become unclear, and commitment to both lines may be challenging. Overall, when cultural belonging is combined with hierarchical characteristics, they produce complexity. One pivotal questions is how to balance in the global matrix, to find out where do you belong, or are you part of either one? The managers told several examples about the matrix challenge and said they need very procession instructions, and who is making the decisions.

“There are really big cultural challenges. In China we have tried to drive the matrix organization, according to my experience, Chinese culture is not ready to understand and use the matrix organization, it means that leadership roles are unclear, what is the responsibility of the operative line and the line of fire. The difficulty is that they are used to take orders, it is difficult to get used to whose orders I obey, matrix is seen as uncertainty.” (ars)

However, according to the interviewed managers, the Chinese business culture is somehow simple: “They need to know the organization and who the boss is, I need this and you get that, it is easy. Chinese are not difficult, you can work easily virtually in lync for example, but basically only in terms of control and follow-up.” (arh) ” In one meeting Chinese participants started the meeting asking to see the organizations chart to understand who is who.” (arh) “The direct manager is always a king to Chinese” (aah)

”it is important for Chinese that they never lose their face. They have this possibility in Lync meetings, they have more time to prepare…if you push them to the corner, which is common in the Finnish style, telling them they are wrong, it is a terrible place to them. Virtually I am able to “warn” them, I want everybody has a feeling he is a winner” (arh)

Conflict

The managers of this study emphasized in unison that the all kind of conflict situations are occasions when virtual environment makes leadership difficult. When there is a conflict between team members or with some issue, managers want to meet their employees face to face. According to the interviews, this is because they want to handle the case carefully, but especially because they want to see how people feel and how they react to what managers say. They also feel that they can influence people better in face to face communication, influence was said to be difficult in virtual connection. Managers described these different conflict situations in many ways, adding practices they had learned, and about which they needed to remind themselves.

”In conflict situations virtual leadership is challenging. I cannot manage conflicts virtually. If you think about our communication, one important part is that you see another person… if you think about influencing, it is important what kind of contact you create to this employee: how you look at him, and everything else, expressions on your face, there are things which don’t transmit via phone or live meeting. In conflict, when emotions are on play, it is important that we are face to face, we have then more tools and weapons, phone is for the first aid, but to get the situation resolved, I want to meet face to face, I want to prioritize the case to face to face. The prize of face to face is the highest, your dedicate 100% time for the person then.” (atp)

“I try to make them to speak, I need to listen to them and be open myself, I have to see if they are feeling desperate, I want to see if they need time to digest some things, these are very difficult situations for me, too. If virtual contact is the only possibility, I try to behave as similarly as in physical contact.”

”In European countries I have one to one meetings twice a month, they tell carefully about many things in their country and in the end they say everything is ok. Later on I go and visit there physically, and realize there is a big crises going on. They tell me then that they didn’t want to bother me because I am so busy, but this conflict was already affecting to their work. I talked about my expectations with them in the evening and told how important it is for me they they spak about difficult things, too. In the end of these discussions I asked everyone if they are committed to our decisions. (ane)

Stress and well-being

A virtual manager works in a virtual world in which somebody is always awake and working. Although communication technology has made it possible to avoid travelling, virtual work has increased managers’ work load in many ways. The number of virtual meetings grows easily and it is not impossible that the managers of this study had 6-8 virtual meetings in one working day. Working online brings work easily home and different time zones lengthen the working days. Sitting in Europe and having employees in Asian countries means that you need to start your working day early:

“in my case half of the day is having virtual meetings. I am typically in phone all the time from 6 am to mid day, as long as Chinese employees are awake. The meetings need to be short enough, I have noticed that the limit of concentration is 45 minutes, you notice that people lose focus after it.”(arh)

One of the objectives of virtual work is to streamline and simplify work, but sometimes virtuality increases communication, meetings and collaboration. For example, managers try to receive commitment by engaging and involving a big amount of people to the work and decision-making. Virtually this is possible, and according to the interviews, the number of virtual meeting participants can rise up to 30 people. The need to have all potential team members virtually present can turn to an impossible task and cause inefficiency. The data describes long meetings and over-committing or over-engaging people:

”we have people engagement things, part of them valid, but this stiffens the organization, we implement too many survey rounds, ask everyone’s opinion, we cannot keep everyone satisfied, we tend to harp on, we have too many meetings…” (ajk)

Summary: the feelings of inadequate and guilty

In this study it was found out that virtual leadership is challenging and demanding, and apparently different from traditional, collocated leadership. The managers need to cope with numerous daily challenges and discover solutions with which they can overcome the challenges and difficulties. Virtual leaders are not usually supported by the employer or company, because new virtual teams and virtual forms of work are born in a rapid pace, support such as training and education is falling behind. In managers’ work this means that they need to start “on the fly”, and the most typical way of surviving as a virtual manager seem to be by trial and error.

The findings of this study show that leadership plays out differently and is more difficult in virtual environment in than in traditional environment. There are certain common factors to these differentiating themes, presented in the findings. One connective and comprehensive factor to the challenges seemed to be feeling of inadequacy. In the end of one long interview I asked the manager to describe her virtual work with one word. After a long pause she stated: “having a constant bad conscience and feeling inadequate.” She explained that having a team in different countries, she cannot be present and available enough, she can’t meet her employees often enough, or even call them as often as they need. Inadequacy became an important theme in the interviews. Managers spoke about their experiences and practices in a busy and demanding virtual work, and felt that they can’t do enough. Employees want managers to be available, but according to the interviewees, virtual presence was difficult to build. Managers also feel that sometimes their skills were not adequate to build good leadership, according to one senior manager: “my major concern is that my leadership work is getting worse in virtual environment”. (JHe)

Simultaneously, the company demands and expectations grow continuously in challenging economy. Managers feel they are “between a rock and a hard place”: they attempt to implement company goals successfully, work according to the processes and reach individual goals as leaders. At the same time employees are demanding a lot from them, despite the distance, the time zone, or realistic possibilities. 5. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

Virtual work, already common place in global organizations, is emerging faster than technology, tools and companies support can react. Though research is exploding and has begun to uncover the unique characteristics of virtual teams and virtual work, there is a great deal we still do not know about virtual leadership and virtual leaders’ work. The purpose of this empirical study has been to explore leaders’ experiences in virtual leadership to find out how virtual environment alters leadership. As the earlier research addresses, distance from co-workers complicates managers’ work in virtual teams (e.g. Gibson and Cohen 2003; Malhotra et al. 2007; Nijstad, 2009), creating mutual understanding (Cramton, 2001), building trust (e.g. Crisp and Jarvenpaa 2012, Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1999; Malhotra et al. 2007), and completing joint tasks (e.g. Espinosa, DeLone & Lee 2006). However, we don’t know enough about leaders’ daily experiences and perceptions in virtual work, and this study has tried to fill that gap.

The empirical findings of this study show that trust, commitment, knowledge sharing, conflict solving, and influence are crucial and difficult factors in virtual work: to be successful in these areas, leadership has to be different. The differences in leadership were studied and shown in this study as leadership practices, First, building trust requires active cooperation and face to face meetings. The findings challenge the prevailing assumptions about trust being temporary and swift in virtual work: according to this study, trust was difficult in the beginning, but grows gradually over time and can reach the comparable levels to those in face-to face teams over time (see also Wilson et al. 2006). Second, to gain commitment and ensure task compliance, managers seem to use trust as an instrument to attain commitment, mandatory element to get the work done. Trust and commitment are seen in conjunction, they establish a dynamic setting, acting together, but require being active on the part of managers. Third, systematic, structured and regular communication is used to improve issues in knowledge sharing and conflict solving (see Rosen et al. 2007 and Malhotra et al. 2008), but managers experience the increasing amount of communication as wearing and time-consuming. Fourth, the managers of this study find influence as one of the biggest challenges in their leadership work within virtual teams, and an issue which seriously interferes with leadership. Influence is the essence of leadership. To be effective as a leader, it is necessary to influence people to carry out requests and implement decisions. In virtual team, gaining influence is different from traditional teams. Missing the communication channels and body language make leaders feel uncertain especially in terms of influencing employees, virtual influence is experienced as difficult. Virtual influence was seen as main themes in which virtuality hampers leadership.

Virtual environment generates feelings of inadequacy and guilt. These feelings are potentially rather obvious and similar in traditional leadership, too, but they emphasize differently in a virtual environment. New environment creates new expectations to managers, possibly also anxiety or fear of adapting the new working culture and e.g. of losing control on people and decisions. In these situations, managers are often alone. Their ultimate objective is to be good leaders, but what is good or adequate leadership? Moreover, as virtual environment and the number of contacts puts pressure on effective communication, follow-up, number-oriented and controlling tasks, leadership is returning closer to harder management. It will be apparent, however, that leadership is developing and changing rapidly in a virtual world. REFERENCES

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