The Emergence of Leadership and Team Roles in a Virtual Environment: An Investigation of Teams Separated by "The Pond"

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The Emergence of Leadership and Team Roles in a Virtual Environment: An Investigation of Teams Separated by "The Pond"

9 Apr 2013 - 14:00 to 15:00

Kemmy Business School

The Work, Knowledge and Employment
Seminar Invitation

The WKE Research Theme invites you to a seminar by

Dr. Dawn Eubanks

Titled:
The Emergence of Leadership and Team Roles in a Virtual Environment: An Investigation of Teams Separated by "The Pond"

Date: 14.00-15.00, Tuesday, 9^th April 2013
Venue: KBG-16, Kemmy Business School

All are welcome to attend

Dr. Dawn Eubanks
Dawn Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and Strategy at Warwick Business School. She earned her PhD in Industrial Organizational Psychology with a minor in quantitative methods from The University of Oklahoma.Dawn's research interests are primarily in the areas of leadership and innovation, with particular interest in destructive leadership. Within leadership, she is exploring the darker side including reactions to criticism and different types of leader errors as related to performance outcomes. Innovation research includes a focus upon how to foster this characteristic across a range of contexts. She has received a number of grants through the EPSRC and British Government to pursue her research in the dark side of leadership. Her research findings appear in journals such as The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Creativity Research Journal, and Human Resource Management Review. Dawn sits on the editorial boards of The Leadership Quarterly and Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

Summary of Seminar
While some research has begun to identify the causes and effects of emergent and shared leadership in virtual teams, very little research has explored leader emergence and sharedness in a particular and important type of virtual team: a partially distributed team, or PDT (a team with at least one collocated subgroup and at least two subgroups that are geographically dispersed). Past research on virtual teams indicates that emergent leadership tends to take one of three general forms (which we dub Project Coordinator, Contributor, and Integrator). Other research indicates that shared leadership in virtual teams is important, but that the form of the sharing is important and will vary. We combine and develop these two streams of research with a focus on PDTs, surmising that the highest performing PDTs will have a single Project Coordinator for each subgroup, multiple Contributors within the team, and fewer Integrators within the team. A sample of 28 PDTs with members working on two different continents generally provides support for the hypothesized relationships.