Companies from across the globe move from traditional towards virtual organisations to be able to respond effectively to developments and changes in the global economy. As a consequence, the leadership of virtual teams will evolve as one of the major challenges future leaders will have to face. Hence, this triggers a growing demand in knowledge and understanding of virtual teams from both science and practice. So far, there is only basic research available on key elements of virtual teaming and limited literature on the leadership of virtual teams. With the increasing significance of a corporate culture in organisations, science will want to investigate its impact on virtual team leadership. Shedding light into this matter is hence this dissertation\''s main objective. After a thorough literature review and a pre-study, a leading EURO STOXX 50 company which has rolled out a global corporate culture in the past years was investigated using interviews with experienced virtual team leaders. Their experiences from before and after the introduction of a global corporate culture were assessed and analysed. Finally, focus groups were conducted to validate the results. In order to provide a holistic picture of the influence of a global corporate culture on the leaders of virtual teams, each empirical component follows a three phase sequence. First, it seeks to understand the environment of a virtual team leader, aiming specifically at investigating how the corporate culture shifts the behaviour of virtual team members. In the next phase, it focuses on how virtual leaders then react to the shift in team member behaviour. The last phase focuses on how the leaders are directly influenced by the global corporate culture themselves. The results of the study show that a common global corporate culture positively influences the collaboration of virtual team members and increases harmony between them. This leads to higher team performance. In response to this shift in team behaviour as well as due to the direct impact of the corporate culture, the leader himself switches gradually from a transactional towards a transformational leadership style, thereby again increasing the performance of the team. The results of the empirical research are channelled into a final product, namely detailed best practices for virtual team leaders on how to develop themselves and their team into effective virtual collaborators. This model uses corporate culture as a catalyst.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the current field of virtual leadership and virtual teams. This study aims to examine the effects on leadership, the relation between the leader and the team member, and the collaboration as a consequence of a rapid virtual transition. This qualitative research was conducted with an inductive approach through a    case study. Primary data was collected through three semi-structured interviews with team leaders from different departments and nine semi-structured interviews with their respective team members. The primary data was analyzed in a thematic way and had support from a theoretical model conducted from secondary sources. This study signifies the importance of establishing relationships, trust and effective communication within teams in virtual environments and recognizes how these aspects are essential for leaders when guiding a team through a rapid virtual transition. Being a leader under the investigated condition suggests individualized leadership as beneficial to maintain stability and trust through the reorganization process. Managerial attitudes are confirmed as influential on team performance through a transition and the transformational leadership theory is argued to be successful when managing a change process based on the studied case.

Today’s globalized world and the internationalization of many companies have put pressure on companies to change their communication patterns, both external and internal. The way of operating has also changed. The technological advancements made during the past decades have allowed employees to have almost unlimited possibilities to communicate with each other, no matter the distance. This has led to a new phenomenon, Virtual Teams. Working virtually has become more common in recent time, while the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies and teams to adapt to a virtual environment. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the influence Interpersonal Communication has on the employees’ trust and motivation in Virtual Teams. The research was of a qualitative nature and the collection of primary data was made through semi-structured in-depth interviews with mainly open-ended questions. The participants consisted of five (5) employees and one (1) manager from the same virtual team, with the members located across the globe. The findings showed that Interpersonal Communication has a positive influence on the employees’ motivation and trust, mostly through the establishment of Interpersonal Relations, Sense of Belonging and Level of Involvement. Many of the findings are supported by previous literature and research. The authors argue that the level of influence interpersonal communication has is dependent on the experience and seniority of the members, as well as it having the strongest influence in the beginning of a team. The thesis has contributed to previous and current literature and research, while having implications for future research, managers and virtual teams.

Over the last decades, there is a constant experimentation on new organizational models and structures by many international companies aiming to overcome the difficulties of a highly competitive global market and satisfy the needs of the customers 24/7. As such, the companies have commonly adopted virtual team strategies using also the technological advancements. In order to optimally use their resources, they have also used matrix organizational structures. In such complex and demanding organizational models, the virtual managers face a lot of challenges in order to effectively lead their teams. Therefore, the required managerial competencies and skills related to an effective team performance are of great scientific interest. The objective of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, this thesis aims to examine how managerial competencies of a virtual manager in matrix organizations influence the performance of a team and what the most important skills of these competencies are. Secondly, it aims to identify the managerial skills that a virtual functional manager and a virtual project leader need in order to effectively manage their teams and compare these skillsets. This study adapts a survey strategy with the use of an online questionnaire and gathers responses from professional engineers that virtually work in matrix organizational schemes mainly based in Sweden and Switzerland. The descriptive analysis of the collected data shows that both type of virtual managers (functional and project) have similar managerial skills which are commonly found in managers working in more traditional organizational models. This is not in line with the findings of our study, since in our analysis we considered the virtuality dimension, for which our results show that it strongly affects the virtual team performance. Therefore, the required managerial competence is formed with skills that are more important in the virtual context than in other traditional models. A second finding is that a virtual functional manager requires different skills compared to the virtual project leader, which suggests that the companies should account for the management role in the hiring process of a specific type of virtual manager. A future research on virtual teams in matrix organizations taking into consideration the different levels of virtuality or broader sampling techniques or case studies per industry would be of a great interest.

Ineffective strategies to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) to support global virtual teams (GVTs) have adversely affected organizations' performance. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the effective strategies participating GVT managers in 2 organizations in the United States used to integrate ICT to support teams' success. The population comprised managers in New York with at least 3 years of service integrating successful strategies in ICT to support GVT success. Transformational leadership theory was used as the conceptual framework for this study. The data collection process included asking 4 participants semistructured interview questions as well as reviewing archival data from the organizations. Data analysis using mind mapping analysis resulted in 5 major themes: forms of communication, redundancy, inclusion, accessibility, and infrastructure. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential to create economic opportunities in developed and underdeveloped countries by incorporating or adapting some or all these strategies to improve efficiencies using ICT to support the success of GVTs. Improving GVT success rates could enable organizations to maintain and grow jobs benefiting employees, families, and communities.

Globalization impacts the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry; customers in the AEC industry are seeking lower costs, faster construction schedules and higher quality services. In order to keep up with the changing demand and to stay competitive in the global AEC industry, firms are forming joint ventures and outsourcing design and services work.  As a result, these new trends in the AEC industry require the collaboration of widely dispersed and diverse project workers and companies.  Accordingly, it becomes increasingly important to understand the impact of diversity on performance.  In this sense, the initial aim of this study was to find empirical evidence on how differences in national culture and language may affect performance in Global Project Networks (GPNs).  According to the results of the first experiment comparing the performance of multi-cultural versus mono-cultural simulated project networks over time, I found cultural and linguistic diversity to have a negative impact on initial performance. However, culturally and linguistically diverse project networks studied achieved better adaptation performance that has long term advantages. Even though GPNs have long term performance benefits, bringing the widely dispersed project participants together is costly.  Therefore, firms are seeking ways to employ collaboration technologies to bring together the project participants.  Little research exists to examine how to increase the efficiency of GPNs that collaborate using technologies such as virtual workspaces to perform design work.  In order to examine collaboration in GPNs utilizing virtual workspaces, I conducted two experiments.  In the first study, I investigated the formation and the maintenance of Transactive Memory Systems (TMSs) and cohesive subgroups as a proxy for performance in two facilitated and two non-facilitated global virtual project networks.  I found a negative impact on collaboration effectiveness when process facilitators engaged in content facilitation in virtual project networks, which restricts the establishment of TMSs. The findings of the first study revealed inappropriate ways of facilitating GPNs collaborating in virtual workspaces, which motivated the second study.  In the second experiment, I observed two global and two domestic virtual project networks that were appropriately facilitated.  I examined the interactions between network members in order to identify whether significant differences between the collaboration approaches of global and domestic virtual project networks exist. Facilitators were utilized more frequently in global networks, particularly in the early stages of collaboration. Boundary spanning visualization technologies within the virtual workspace were also utilized more frequently by the global network members; however, this was due more to the spatial richness of the task than the maturity of the collaboration. The overall findings have significant implications in improving the effectiveness of global project network collaborations in virtual workspaces. / Ph. D.

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Virtual teams are being increasingly utilized in industry given their ability to bring together diverse knowledge and experience from individuals who are not geographically proximal. Having a diversity of knowledge within virtual teams is noted to benefit innovation outcomes; however, leveraging the benefits of diversity (both deep-level and functional level) is likely to require a capability to facilitate collaboration among team members. This dissertation examines collaboration capability and absorptive capacity at the virtual team level by evaluating the inter-relationships among the dimensions and their influence on team innovation. This research also tests the impact of team diversity on team innovation with an additional focus on understanding the moderating impact of collaboration capability and the mediating impact of absorptive capacity. Two dimensions of team diversity are examined. The first dimension, deep-level diversity, involves the individual characteristics, values, attitudes and preferences. The second dimension, functional-level diversity, which entails the diversity in functional and expertise backgrounds. Survey data was collected from 166 virtual team members and the validation process revealed satisfactory psychometric properties at the items and the constructs level. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was carried out to determine the factor structure of the hypothesized models, as well as its reliability and validity.

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Social loafing is a growing concern for modern organizations. With advancement in computer technology, virtual tools are used more frequently to communicate, which may allow social loafing to occur in new and unfamiliar forms. The intent of this thesis is to examine social loafing through the use of virtual tools, and to analyze whether collective orientation has a moderating influence on the relationship between social loafing and virtuality. 30 teams, each containing four participants, were randomly assigned to a condition of virtuality (i.e., instant messaging or videoconferencing). Participants then completed a computer simulation task in which social loafing, collective orientation of the team, and team performance were measured.