Leadership in a Non-Traditional Setting: Self-Managing Virtual IS Development Teams

Despite its abundance, traditional leadership research cannot be claimed to transfer directly to the leadership context of self-managing virtual (SMV) Information Systems Development teams. Unique conditions of these novel team environments require focused studies of leadership in virtual team settings. Although there are some studies of virtual team leadership that make important contributions to the literature, these studies typically use short term, ad-hoc teams of students. This study ultimately aims at filling the gap in the literature by investigating how leadership manifests in real-life SMV IS teams over time. In this paper, the overall study is introduced and the initial findings based on the content analysis schema development effort are reported.