Globalization and fast developing technology are allowing organizations to spread their operations across the world. While this is often cost effective and increases companies’ competitiveness, a new challenge for leadership has arisen as people and teams are becoming geographically dispersed. Leaders and followers are relying more heavily on computer-mediated communication instead of traditional face-to-face interaction. The aim of this thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of leadership in geographically dispersed teams. As communication is occurring primarily through virtual channels, the purpose is to study the effect this phenomenon has on the leader’s role and how followers experience virtual leadership. This thesis also outlines the impact of leadership in virtual teams; how to create and maintain team spirit, how to establish trust, and how to ensure team effectiveness. Additionally, this study examines the main challenges and opportunities  in virtual leadership, what competencies are required for virtual leaders, and how important communication is in the concept of virtual leadership. Data for this study was collected from ten various professionals, including both leaders' and followers', by conducting qualitative semi-structured interviews with each individual. The findings of the empirical research show that there is a relatively optimistic attitude towards virtual leadership. However, there are certainly critical challenges when it comes to relationship building, team cohesion, and communication. There is a significant need for raising awareness of virtual leadership, as it is becoming more the norm than the exception in the modern business world.

This Master thesis is an exploratory study that had the initial aim to research leadership in distributed teams, but, which ended up changing the focus as a result of unexpected findings. Therefore, the study refocused on collaboration in distributed teams with the purpose to explore the work environment of distributed teams from a collaborative perspective, with the aim of trying to develop an in‐depth understanding of the factors that contribute and challenge the cohesion in these teams. Furthermore, our aim was to present our findings in a model, which would describe the collaborative environment in distributed teams. Our research design was a single case study with embedded cases, overall 13 interviews were conducted representing leaders and members of hybrid distributed teams, which gave rich and descriptive data of their collaborative environment. Our empirical findings showed that structure has a significant impact on collaboration. This led to another finding, which states that management skills are more relevant than leadership skills in the virtual context. Furthermore, we could also identify several challenges, which were not explicitly approached in previous literature. Limitations/Implications: Our research is limited to a single case study, therefore future investigations including several cases or companies from different industries would be advised to strengthen the findings. Our research project contributes to the existing literature, by extending the research field of collaboration in distributed teams, while also having implications for companies, which have employees across the world and thus, consider developing or implementing this specific work unit.

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