A question of leadership: What does effective leadership look like in a virtual work environment, and can Web-based leadership operate the same way that face-to-face leadership does?
✍ Scribed by Laura Erskine
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2009
- Weight
- 170 KB
- Volume
- 28
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1093-6092
- DOI
- 10.1002/lia.1270
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Management annual meeting in August 2008, several academics met to discuss how to understand effective leadership in this virtual world.
In this environment, time and space have different meanings. Under more traditional work arrangements, employees were co-located; today, coworkers may be collaborating or coordinating activities from geographically diverse locations. Because leaders may no longer have the luxury of bringing people together physically as an aid to keeping them focused on the right job, they often have to rely on the emotional connections that result from bringing people together around organizational mission and vision. As a result, behavior becomes more discretionary and cohesion around mission and vision enables all employees to step up to leadership roles-leading both themselves and others.
Although distance as a factor in leader-follower relationships is certainly not a new issue (consider Jesuit missionaries, military field commanders, and traveling sales reps, for example), it is becoming a critical factor for a greater number of individuals and organizations. The discussion