| The rise of globalization has been accompanied by the growth of global virtual teams: groups of individuals working together while being dispersed across time zones, geographies, and cultures. The problem was to understand how leadership emerges in these teams, using the experiences and perceptions of knowledge workers who emerged as leaders within a global virtual team (GVT) context. The purpose was to explore and describe the phenomenon of emergent leadership within a GVT, through a heuristic inquiry of work practice. Distributed cognition and complex adaptive systems theories were the basis of the conceptual framework. Research questions explored how leadership behavior and processes emerged through team member interactions in synchronous and asynchronous media. In this phenomenological, heuristic study, data were collected via 14 semistructured interviews and interpreted using a postphenomenological analytic framework. The study found that emergent leaders anticipated organizational threats to team success earlier than others, that emergent leadership behaviors were socially constructed and often distributed instead of attributed to a single leader, and that team success depended on emergent leaders extending their presence through technology to overcome the cultural, geographic, and temporal disparities that technology tends to amplify. Implications of positive social change include that improvement of virtual team interactions may lead to positive organizational outcomes such as increased revenues from improved speed-to-market, cost-reduction through sustainable work settings, and increased employment opportunities through the virtue of inclusiveness in hiring practices. |
