Emergence of Leaders in Virtual Teams: What Matters?

Leadership is currently viewed as a key though relatively unexplored variable influencing the effectiveness of virtual teams. This paper identifies and empirically examines potential factors explaining the emergence of leaders in cross-cultural ISD virtual teams. Results of the study indicate that factors such as performance, culture, cultural ability, trust, ISD ability, communication ability, and co-location with client explain the emergence of leaders in the initial stages of a project, while performance, culture, and ISD ability explain the emergence of a leader in later stages. Interestingly, in both initial and later stages, technical ability of an individual was found to have a negative effect on leader emergence. Also, the extent of communication was found to have no effect in both stages, thereby falsifying the “babble hypothesis.”