Distributed Leadership across the Boundaries of a Virtual Organization1

This paper examines the leadership behaviors exhibited in a twelve-month field study of the eCommerce systems group for a global service consultancy. We find that leadership involves a distributed management of meaning across functional and organizational boundaries. The extent to which leadership processes are distributed across group members increases with the span of inter-group coordination required. Distributed forms of leadership are required to both manage the social network necessary for global coordination and to acquire the polycontextual knowledge and expertise required to complete projects that span multiple business units and groups. We present a framework for how such groups manage distributed leadership in practice, with significant implications for the design of global management information systems.