Experimental Study Of Virtual Team Leadership Style Of Conflict And Performance Impact

Increasing globalization and advances in communication technology have led to the emergence of virtual teams in many organizations since 1990's. Leadership has been seen as one of the most important key factors which predict virtual teams' performance by prior researchers.Transformational/transactional leadership as a new leadership theory has gained much more attentions in recent years. However the past researches about the relationship between transformational/transactional leadership and team performance mostly focus on the face-to-face traditional teams but not on the virtual teams, meanwhile most of the researches only paid attentions to the direct effect of leadership on team performance and ignored the process mechanism and the role of the process variables just like conflict and conflict management played in this relationship. So in order to explore deeply the relationship between leadership and team performance and open the "black box", we are faced 3 questions to answer, as below: 1. What different effect of transformational leadership and transactional leadership has on team performance, in the other word whether there is a more effective style of leadership than the other.2.Focus on the process variables and find out what effects leadership has on conflict and conflict management. 3. What the relationships between process variables and team performance are.In this paper, we developed the hypotheses and model based on the "I-P-O" (input-process-outcome) framework which has been used widely in the research field about team work. Then an experiment which involved 41 teams (123 participants) was conduct to test these hypotheses. Results indicated that:1. Transformational leadership results in higher levels of team performance than transactional leadership in virtual teams.2. Transformational leadership stimulates lower levels of relationship conflict, lower levels of competitive conflict management behavior and higher levels of cooperative conflict management behavior than transactional leadership in virtual teams.3. Relationship conflict has negative effect on team performance and cooperative conflict management behavior weaken this negative effect. This research may have some implications for management of virtual teams. Managers can know more about the role of leadership plays in virtual teams, and gain some inspirations to develop more effective management mechanism and improve performance.