Reimagining e-leadership for reconfigured virtual teams due to Covid-19

Highlights

• Covid-19 has led to new, differently configured virtual teams with new characteristics.

• Leaders of physically collocated teams had to transition into e-leaders.

• e-Leadership should be reimagined by focusing on the themes presented in our model.

• Each theme shows how existing literature can be applied to Covid-19 VTs.

• New propositions and implications for research and practice emerge from our model.

Abstract

Driven by an unexpected transition into virtual working worldwide as a result of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, in this paper, we examine the extent to which existing knowledge from the literature on virtual teams (VTs) spanning two decades can be used to inform how leadership can be exercised in the Covid-19 ‘new normal’, involving ‘reconfigured’ VTs which have both similarities with, and differences from, earlier VTs. Drawing on existing literature on VTs pre-Covid-19, we explore what current (and future) VTs might look like and what this means for leadership in this new context with an emphasis on how leadership, or e-leadership, can be exercised to help the leaders of traditional, physically collocated teams that had to transition into VTs. These new e-leaders need to come to grips with a variety of new challenges in order to create high-performing and sustainable VTs. Following a semi-systematic, state-of-the-art literature review, we: (a) identify key themes and explain with a theoretical model how existing knowledge can lead to new insights for newly transitioned e-leaders; (b) discuss what future information systems (IS) researchers should focus on given the reconfiguration and new characteristics of VTs in the Covid-19 context; and (c) ‘translate’ the findings of our synthesis of the existing literature into prescriptive advice that can be used to inform practitioners.

Introduction

Information systems (IS) and management researchers have been studying virtual teams (VTs) for over two decades. Generally defined as (organisational/project) teams that are dispersed across boundaries and that collaborate via information and communication technologies (ICTs) to accomplish an organisational task or project (e.g., Townsend, DeMarie, & Hendrickson, 1998), VTs emerged due to technological capabilities and business trends for globalisation (Townsend et al., 1998). VTs became popular because of their unparalleled benefits compared to physically collocated, face-to-face (F2F) teams. These range from access to globally distributed and geographically remote talent, through to the reduction of transportation and other costs, as well as increased flexibility for employees (Ebrahim, Ahmed, & Taha, 2009). Although VTs have been around for more than two decades (e.g., Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999), the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) has led to a widespread transition into virtual teamwork, often termed remote or distributed working in the literature (Venkatesh, 2020). It has also reignited interest in how ICTs can lead to work reconfigurations, enabling different ways of working, thus making new research necessary (e.g., Ågerfalk, Conboy, & Myers, 2020; Bailey & Breslin, 2021; Chamakiotis, 2020b; Waizenegger, McKenna, Cai, & Bendz, 2020). To date (June 2021), a small number of studies have been undertaken in an effort to understand how regular, physically collocated, F2F teams turned virtual with the help of ICTs as a direct consequence of the Covid-19 outbreak (e.g., Waizenegger et al., 2020). Our argument in this paper is that, although these newly transitioned teams share some characteristics with earlier VTs pre-Covid-19, the enforced nature of virtual work that has arisen as a result of the pandemic, as well as the increasingly hybrid forms of work, require alternative leadership practices and focus (Feitosa & Salas, 2020). Leadership, or e-leadership, has been recognised as an important contributor to, and a prerequisite for, VT success in the existing VT literature (e.g., Contreras, Baykal, & Abid, 2020; Gilson, Maynard, Jones Young, Vartiainen, & Hakonen, 2015; Larson & DeChurch, 2020). In the early literature in this field, Kerber and Buono (2004) identified the challenges facing e-leaders due to the unique characteristics of VTs. Some of these include looking at the bigger picture of the VT despite local priorities, and creating a common identity despite geographical separation. However, in the era of transition into working from home and places not traditionally associated with work, are these still relevant, and if so, are they the only challenges the newly transitioned e-leader is faced with?

Pre-Covid-19, a distinct characteristic of this form of organising was that VTs were essentially a choice, driven by the organisation in its efforts to access globally dispersed talent and develop collaborations regardless of time and space and to become more flexible and adaptive (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002); or by individuals due to their preference for flexible working (Igbaria, 1999). The emergence of Covid-19 in late 2019 punctuated the stable pre-Covid-19 status quo, and radically transformed the underlying structures of organisations (cf., Gersick, 1991), forcing large parts of the global working population to transition into a virtual, home-based (thus, more local in comparison to earlier VTs) working mode (e.g., Ancona, Bresman, & Mortensen, 2020). VT adoption was therefore not a choice, but rather a matter of organisational continuity and survival (Richter, 2020).

Virtual working in the Covid-19 context is characterised by several distinct features: First, newly formed VTs involve different types of employees, including those who previously either did not want to work from home (i.e., telecommute) or were not permitted to do so. Second, due to the lack of organisational readiness, employees had to rely on their own personal computing devices, software and networks for work tasks. Third, the new virtual workers were often based in environments where the workspace had to be shared with spouses, children and flatmates, thus adding to disruptions and tensions. With schools shut and home-schooling the new norm, many individuals were unprepared both in technological and mental terms, often competing for the use of computing equipment and Wi-Fi with others in the same household, thus juggling home-schooling, homework and full-time work (Oppenheim, 2020).

While it is difficult to forecast the longer-term impacts of Covid-19 on organisations and the way we work, evidence from well-known companies in different industries — from Barclays, PwC, Unilever, Facebook and Twitter that have asked their employees to continue to work from home, through to McKinsey & Company who have suggested that the vast majority of employees prefer to work in VTs — shows that these new types of VTs are here to stay (Boland, De Smet, Palter, & Sanghvi, 2020). As a result, an increasing number of businesses signal a move away from expensive offices in an attempt to reduce their overheads (Jasper, 2020, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 2020). According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), whilst home working used to be viewed as a taboo, the Covid-19 lockdown has provided the opportunity to undertake a huge natural experiment in this form of work. What we see, therefore, is large-scale digital transformations (e.g., Carnevale & Hatak, 2020; Carroll & Conboy, 2020; Fletcher & Griffiths, 2020; Venkatesh, 2020), challenging how management can be practised, and creating a need for new working practices for both team members and team leaders. Motivated by our aim to understand how the Covid-19 context is impacting e-leadership in new VTs (what we often refer to as ‘Covid-19 VTs’), in this paper, we address the following research question:

How can existing knowledge on e-leadership be applied to Covid-19 VTs and what is left to be studied?

e-Leadership constitutes an established research area within the VT literature. As Gilson et al. (2015, pp. 1319–1320) put it, “[e-]leaders may play a central role in VT functioning, particularly as they influence how a team deals with obstacles and how the team ultimately adapts in the face of such challenges” reinforcing the need for effective leadership in times of crisis, as it is the case with the current Covid-19 pandemic. Industry reports from McKinsey & Company and Deloitte, among others, have explicitly stated some of the challenges facing traditional leaders who had to transition into VT e-leaders; they include promoting new e-leadership styles, managing work-life boundaries, and ensuring VT members’ well-being (Comella-Dorda et al., 2020, Deloitte, 2020). Though much can be learnt from prior VT literature, where numerous scholars have examined ICT-mediated interactions among dispersed team members (e.g., Kayworth & Leidner, 2002), our position is that new forms of VT configurations make the rethinking of e-leadership practices essential in order to enable organisations to lead effectively in the new work environment (Carroll & Conboy, 2020). With our work, we extend recent attempts to explore e-leadership (Contreras et al., 2020) or remote/virtual working (Richter, 2020) in the Covid-19 context, by taking into consideration the enforced and more local character of newly formed VTs, and their unique configurational characteristics that distinguish them from earlier VTs. As Waizenegger et al. (2020, p. 429) put it, “[enforced working] impacts people who never had any desire to or were not permitted to [work virtually] due to organisational policies.” Our view is that this is a unique feature of the Covid-19 context that has an impact on how leadership can be exercised, and which previous studies have not explicitly addressed. To achieve our objective, we present a semi-systematic, state-of-the-art review (Grant and Booth, 2009, Snyder, 2019) of the VT literature on e-leadership with the aim of exploring how existing knowledge can be used to inform contemporary IS and management scholarship and practice.

Given that leadership is viewed as a prerequisite for high-performing and sustainable VTs (e.g., Contreras et al., 2020; Gilson et al., 2015; Larson & DeChurch, 2020), we take a closer look into the topic of leadership within the VT literature, and draw connections between recognised themes and challenges facing VTs (e.g., trust, creativity) in our attempt to explore how leadership can be exercised to support VT workers in Covid-19 VTs. Leadership constitutes a rich field in its own right, which has been studied from different perspectives; here, we explore leadership practices in the existing VT literature with the aim of understanding how leaders of traditional, physically collocated teams can transition into e-leaders, i.e., leaders of Covid-19 VTs. Our study contributes key themes in relation to e-leadership, which will be of value to IS, information management (IM), Human Resources (HR), and general management scholars, practitioners, policy makers, as well as to educators interested in understanding how existing knowledge from the VT literature can be applied to the current context where most of us will have to work virtually to some degree.

In what follows, we first present the field of e-leadership in the VT context (Section 2), and detail our methodological approach to reviewing this field (Section 3). We continue with explaining what the impact of Covid-19 has been on VT reconfiguration/characteristics (Section 4) before we present the themes that emerged from our analysis and the new areas for future research (Section 5). Following this, we draw on these themes to develop our theoretical model which leads to one general proposition on what newly transitioned leaders should do, and two specific propositions on how they should do it (Section 6). Finally, we reflect on the contributions of our paper and outline a set of practical recommendations designed to guide team leaders’ transition into VT e-leaders, as well as HR practitioners who may want to use our findings to update their organisational policies in response to Covid-19 (Section 7).