After studying the reading in Module 5, please write a one-page short paper to:
Discuss different ways of how global virtual teams coordinate shared leadership.
Discuss how leadership coordination influences the effectiveness of global virtual teams.
Single-spaced, font size 11 or above. Please submit in Word or PDF formats only
mod10_effectivecoordinationsharedleadershipglobalvirtualteams.pdfsecond part
Please carefully study the reading in Module 10, and write a 2-page short paper to:
Identify the theoretical framework for enforcing information security policies in multinational companies.
Explain national culture and cultural distance
Describe institutional theory and institutional distance
Discuss stickiness and the knowledge transfer process Effective Coordination of Shared
Leadership in Global Virtual Teams
EMMA S. NORDBÄCK AND J. ALBERTO ESPINOSA
EMMA NORDBÄCK (emma.nordback@aalto.fi; corresponding author) is a Postdoctoral
Researcher at the Department of Management Studies at Aalto University School of
Business, Finland. She received her doctoral degree from Aalto University School of
Science. Her research focuses on virtual work arrangements ranging from globally
distributed teams to workplace flexibility, with a special emphasis on technology, leadership, and boundary-spanning practices for innovation. Dr. Nordbäck’s work has been
published in such journals as Journal of Organization Design, Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of
Virtual Worlds Research, and in various leading academic conference proceedings.
J. ALBERTO ESPINOSA (alberto@american.edu) is a Professor of Information
Technology and Analytics at the Kogod School of Business, American
University. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Tepper School of
Business at Carnegie Mellon University. He has co-authored two books on work
coordination across time zones, and on big data and analytics for service delivery.
He has published in leading journals, including Management Science; Organization
Science; Information Systems Research; the Journal of Management Information
Systems; IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on
Engineering Management; Communications of the ACM and others. He also has
many years of experience as a senior manager for global organizations.
ABSTRACT: In this study we investigate how shared leadership is coordinated in global
virtual teams and how it relates to team effectiveness. Based on 71 interviews with
team members and leaders from eight teams from two global software development
companies, we found that shared leadership had a more positive effect on team
effectiveness when shared leadership was coordinated both implicitly and behaviorally. Implicit leadership coordination is about members sharing same perceptions or
cognitive schemas regarding who has leadership over what, and influences whether
leadership actions are acted upon. With a mix of national cultures in the team,
members are less likely to share the same leadership expectations, which may
make shared leadership less effective. In turn, behavioral leadership coordination is
associated with the explicit actions aimed at coordinating the leadership activities
taking place in the team. This behavioral coordination increases in importance with
a higher degree of shared leadership. Our findings contribute to theory and practice
by showing that when leadership is highly shared in the team and uncoordinated, it
may actually lead to detrimental effects in terms of lower team effectiveness. In
contrast, shared leadership may reap its potential benefits if it is well coordinated.
KEY WORDS AND PHRASES: global virtual teams, team leadership, team effectiveness,
shared leadership, online leadership.
Journal of Management Information Systems / 2019, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 321–350.
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN 0742–1222 (print) / ISSN 1557–928X (online)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2018.1558943
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Suddenly I am like “hey what it this?”… and then Mikko (pseudonym) is
working on something completely different than we agreed upon and tells me
that “Benjamin (pseudonym) [the formal team leader] told me that I should
do this now,” and I am like “hey why did I not get informed?.” This is very
confusing and not a sustainable solution!
This quote from a global team member illustrates an instance of uncoordinated shared
leadership in which a member has been re-directed by the formal leader in another
direction than what was agreed upon with an emergent leader, which in his opinion,
has therefore led to uncoordinated action. This situation may arise in teams with
multiple leaders, a leadership structure commonly referred to as shared leadership
(e.g., [60]). While leadership entails “a process whereby intentional influence is
exerted over other people to guide, structure and facilitate activities and relationships
in a group or organization” [74, p. 2], shared leadership distributes this influence
process over multiple individuals. Shared leadership has been found to be particularly
important for team effectiveness [32, 56] in global virtual teams (GVTs) in which
members collaborate through technology over spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries [47], partly because such boundaries hinder communications. At the same time,
the visibility of leadership actions in GVTs will be generally lower than in co-located
teams, potentially leading to misunderstandings and uncoordinated actions. Given
these barriers for coordination, we argue that it is important to develop a nuanced
understanding of how GVT leaders coordinate their shared leadership actions, which
will lead to team effectiveness and achievement of desirable outcomes. The extant
research on shared leadership has paid virtually no attention to how GVTs coordinate
their leadership activities (or fail to do so). Our study aims to fill this gap.
Organizations are increasingly relying on GVTs to perform their core work
activities [26], which come with many leadership challenges. For instance, individual leaders have reduced ability to exert direct influence on team members due to
the diminished communication opportunities that come along with increased virtuality [1, 55]. Also, GVT members may vary in their expectations for leadership
because of cultural differences, which may lead to diverse leadership expectations
across locations [76], making vertical (i.e., single) leadership less effective.
Especially when the degree of virtuality is high, shared leadership may be more
effective than vertical leadership [32].
Previous research on shared leadership has focused primarily on its relationship to
team effectiveness and several studies have found a positive association (see [15, 69] for
recent meta-analyses), particularly with GVTs [32, 54]. On the one hand, studies have
formulated this association between shared leadership and team effectiveness through
mediators such as: enhanced participation and information sharing; increased team
cohesion and team consensus; and better team functioning [15, 69]. On the other hand,
other studies have found opposite effects (e.g., [6, 51, 63]), indicating that shared
leadership may as well have negative effects on team effectiveness. For instance,
IMPLICIT AND BEHAVIORAL LEADERSHIP COORDINATION
323
Robert [63] found shared leadership to decrease team performance in GVTs and Carte
et al., [10] found that leadership behaviors, such as producer behaviors, aimed at
motivating completion of the group’s task, led to lower team performance when GVT
leadership was shared. Together, these contradicting findings suggest that there might
be some interaction effects at play, which may explain this seemingly inconsistent
association between shared leadership and team performance. For instance, Mehra and
colleagues [51] identified the importance of formal and emergent leaders to perceive
each other as leaders for shared leadership to be beneficial to performance. Drawing on
Mehra’s study and the extant literature, we argue that for shared leadership to be
beneficial to team performance, it must be effectively coordinated, above and beyond
traditional task coordination. That is, we investigate whether coordination of the leadership itself can explain why and how shared leadership is effective in some cases and
detrimental in others, helping us fill this gap in the research literature. Our rationale
follows from coordination theory [44, 45], which we discuss next.
Task coordination has been found to mitigate the negative effects of global boundaries (e.g., spatial and temporal) [14, 17] on GVT performance, particularly when the
task activities have dependencies. In fact, task coordination is defined precisely as the
management of these task dependencies [45]. In a similar vein, we argue that shared
leadership generates additional coordination needs. Thus, consistently with coordination theory we define shared leadership coordination as the management of dependencies among leadership activities, above and beyond task coordination. While leadership
in general has been regarded as a key mechanism for overcoming task coordination
challenges faced by GVTs [43], shared leadership coordination is not about task
coordination, but about the coordination that the multiple leaders themselves and
their followers need to achieve in order for the overall leadership to work as
a cohesive whole. When a single leader enacts influence on the whole team (vertical
leadership, see Figure 1), only task-dependencies needs to be coordinated. But when
multiple leaders enacts influence on the team (shared leadership, see Figure 1), leadership dependencies needs to be coordinated, in addition to task dependencies.
While it has been argued that shared leadership influences team effectiveness in
GVTs positively through an increase in task coordination [54], it has also been
argued that shared leadership decreases team effectiveness in GVTs, through
increased coordination problems [63]. However, we lack empirical evidence and
a nuanced understanding about the suggested relationship between shared leadership and coordination, and we still know very little about how shared leadership
creates additional leadership coordination needs, above and beyond the task. Given
this gap in our knowledge, we set out to address the following research questions:
Research Question 1: How do global virtual teams coordinate shared
leadership?
and
Research Question 2: How does this leadership coordination influence global
virtual team effectiveness?
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Figure 1. A completely vertical vs. a completely shared leadership structure.
Note: An arrow from one node to another means that leadership moves in that direction.
By answering these questions, our work advances organizational theory in several
important ways. First, we address the previously under-theorized relationship between
shared leadership and team effectiveness in GVT’s by uncovering how leadership
coordination acts as an important intervening factor to influence the effect of shared
leadership on GVT effectiveness. Second, while the extant literature is inconclusive on
the effect of shared leadership on team effectiveness, our study examines the role of
shared leadership coordination as the explanation for these prior contradicting results.
Moreover, we explore two main forms of shared leadership coordination: implicit and
behavioral; thus providing a more nuanced understanding of how shared leadership
operates in teams. In doing so, we integrate shared leadership theory with coordination
theory. None of these perspectives have been adequately investigated yet.
We first present our theoretical foundations. We then describe our methods,
followed by our results. Last, we discuss our results and the implications and
limitations of the study.
Theoretical Foundations
Shared Leadership in GVTs
There is a general consensus in the literature that leading GVTs successfully is
challenging, yet vital for team effectiveness (e.g., [27]). In the context of teams
(including GVTs), leadership is about fulfilling team needs, which may entail
motivating and monitoring team processes, with the ultimate goal of enhancing
team effectiveness [32, 53]. Prior research has commonly focused on leader traits
and behaviors, as well how various situational variables influence leadership
effectiveness [38, 74].
While the majority of prior research has focused on vertical solo leadership, more
recently, scholars have begun to question these top-down, hierarchical and formal
leadership roles. However, the notion that leadership does not reside in a single
individual is not new. Gibb [23, p. 884] articulated in the 1950s that: “leadership is
IMPLICIT AND BEHAVIORAL LEADERSHIP COORDINATION
325
probably best conceived as a group quality, as a set of functions which must be
carried out by the group.” Gibb was hence among the first to pave the way for the
emergence of the concept of shared leadership. Later, Pearce and Conger [60, p. 1]
defined shared leadership as “a dynamic, interactive influence process among
individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals.” While other definitions exist (e.g., [9, 15]),
they all collectively suggest that leadership responsibilities are shared and distributed over more than one person in the team. However, which of these leadership
responsibilities are being shared varies from one study to another.
Research on shared leadership has focused primarily either on the aggregation of
leadership contributed by leaders or on the specific leadership behaviors integrated
into the entire collective leadership (see [69] for a meta-analysis). Within
a behavioral approach, leadership has been conceptualized using a wide variety
of actions aimed at satisfying team needs with the goal of enhancing team effectiveness [75]. For example, Yukl and colleagues [75] classified leadership behaviors
into three categories: task-oriented (e.g., providing directions and monitoring performance), relations-oriented (e.g., providing support and encouragement), and
change-oriented (e.g., proposing a new strategy or vision). All of these behaviors
have been found to predict GVT success (e.g., [40, 59]). Consequently, this
behavioral approach provides a useful theoretical lens to investigate how leadership
is shared and coordinated in GVTs. Consistent with this approach, we study shared
leadership manifested through task, relations, and change-oriented leadership behaviors, as well as through cumulative leadership influence [69].
For the most part, studies on shared leadership in GVTs thus far have been
theoretical, offering propositions and predictions (e.g., [31, 42, 55, 56]). These
studies have suggested that shared leadership increases team effectiveness in GVTs.
A few recent empirical studies [32, 34, 54] also found that shared leadership leads
to increased team performance in GVTs, while a few other studies showed the
opposite effect [63], especially with some leadership behaviors [10]. Robert [63]
offers reasons such as: having multiple members in charge resulting in no one being
in charge; too much focus on trying to accommodate everyone; and potential
coordination problems. In contrast, Muethel et al. [54] theorized that shared leadership leads to increased task coordination and improved communication practices in
teams, which in turn affects team performance positively. Hoch and Kozlowski [32]
reasoned further that shared leadership: creates stronger bonds among team members; facilitates trust, cohesion, and commitment; and mitigate disadvantages of
GVTs, for example by helping members to overcome communication challenges
[3, 60], leading to team performance. Based on these conflicting accounts, it is
difficult to draw a unified conclusion on the effect of shared leadership on team
effectiveness in GVTs. In this study, we argue that employing a coordination
perspective may help reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings. In line
with coordination theory [45], if we decompose leadership into its multiple functions, and distribute these functions across various members, either by adopting
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a shared leadership structure or by letting shared leadership emerge informally, we
anticipate that these leadership functions will need to be tightly coordinated in order
to be effective. In other words, we argue that how well shared leadership enhances
team effectiveness is contingent on how well the shared leadership is coordinated
within the team. We now discuss the role of coordination in shared leadership.
Coordination in GVTs
When team member activities can be accomplished independently, there is
a minimal need to coordinate. But when such activities are interdependent, team
members need to coordinate their work. In fact, coordination has been defined as
the management of such dependencies [45]. Our focus in this research is on
coordination processes associated with shared leadership in GVTs. There are two
streams of research on coordination. The first stream is from the classic organizational literature going back several decades, which argued that coordination is
carried out mechanistically (e.g., plans, programs, schedules, procedures) or organically (e.g., feedback, communication, mutual adjustment) [46]. These two types
of coordination are referred to as “behavioral” [68], because they are based on what
people do to coordinate. Behavioral coordination of workflows has been shown to
be especially important for GVT performance [48].
The second stream comes from the team cognition literature in the psychology
field. While there is an abundance of team cognition labels and constructs in the
literature, they are all based on some form of knowledge team members share about
the task and each other [7]. Team cognition thus refers to the collective knowledge
structure that enables team members to acquire and share knowledge within the
team. Team cognition has been deemed important for coordination because it helps
teams coordinate implicitly through a better “synchronization of member actions
based on unspoken assumptions about what others in the group are likely to do”
[71, p. 129]. Once team members have developed intra-group knowledge [12]
through prior communication and working together [61], this familiarity helps
them anticipate each other’s actions more accurately [62, 71].
Prior research has shown that behavioral and implicit coordination are particularly
important for GVTs, partly because of the communication barriers caused by global
boundaries [19]. Compared to vertical leadership, shared leadership requires additional coordination within GVTs above and beyond what is necessary for pure task
coordination because global boundaries generate the need for local leadership in each
location, effectively breaking down the team’s leadership structure from a single
individual into multiple individuals (see Figure 1). This creates dependencies between
the multiple leaders’ actions. Hence, when leadership is enacted by several individuals
in the team in a decentralized coordination structure [44] the individual leadership
activities need to be coordinated into a coherent whole in order to be effective.
In line with Malone’s decentralized coordination structure [44], shared leadership
is likely to create high coordination costs when a large number of team members
IMPLICIT AND BEHAVIORAL LEADERSHIP COORDINATION
327
participate in the leadership, requiring most leaders to interact frequently, which has
been linked to reduced GVT performance [17]. On the other hand, shared leadership may decrease task production costs because team members may themselves
engage in leadership, rather than consulting a formal leader who may not be
available when needed, thus reducing the overall time to complete their respective
task activities. Consistently, Malone suggests that decentralized coordination systems have least vulnerability costs in the event of a task failure because task
activities can be quickly reassigned to another member, minimizing disruptions
[44]. This also applies to shared leadership activities because leaders can substitute
for each other as needed. In sum, based on coordination theory, we expect that
shared leadership will increase some coordination related costs and decrease others,
which will have differential impacts on team effectiveness, and we argue that
shared leadership coordination can explain these differences.
We also argue that the need for leadership coordination is influenced by the global
boundaries spanned by the team. GVTs need to bridge multiple boundaries, such as
time zones, geographic distance, functional, organizational, and national [30]. As
more global boundaries are bridged by team members, the collaboration environment
becomes more complex [18, 41] making task coordination and shared leadership more
difficult [40]. For instance, an individual’s implicit view of leadership is likely to be
related to cultural specific values, such as power distance [29], which can be defined
as the extent to which a person accepts and endorses authority, inequality in power,
and status privileges [8, 35]. Team members in high power distance cultures are more
likely to accept unequal distribution of power in organizations [35] and accept their
social status as followers [5], making them less equipped and less likely to participate
in the team’s leadership (e.g., [11, 29, 55]). On the other hand, team members from
low power distance cultures are more likely to attempt to minimize inequalities and
favor less centralized leadership approaches [11, 29, 55]. Therefore, having members
with differing power distances in the GVT, may hamper the development of shared
mental models [64] about the shared leadership in the GVT. Moreover, the distribution
of leadership across global boundaries may cause leadership actions to go unnoticed
because communication is hindered.
Methods
We conducted a qualitative multi-case study to investigate how eight GVTs coordinate their leadership activities or fail to do so, and how this coordination impacts
team effectiveness. Using multiple cases is a recommended method to develop
theoretical constructs and propositions from case-based empirical evidence [16].
We treated the eight cases, ranging from high to low levels of shared leadership,
and excellent to poor team effectiveness, as a series of “natural experiments,” each
case serving to confirm or disconfirm the inferences drawn from the others [72].
Yet, the study was designed to be open-ended and to allow new themes to emerge.
This inductive approach has been regarded particularly suitable for the study of
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social influence processes such as leadership, and for the study of phenomena that
are not well understood [52, 58]. Therefore, we applied interpretive research
methods for answering our research questions.
Cases and Data
This study is based on 71 in-depth interviews conducted with members and leaders
of eight GVTs of two organizations. Both organizations developed software and
provided support to their customers worldwide but operated on different markets.
TechAlpha (pseudonym) employed 170 workers and TechBeta (pseudonym) had
600 employees at the time of the study. While both organizations provide technology-mediated support to their customers, TechAlpha also provides installations and
on-site support to customers. The organizations have headquarters in Finland and
area offices throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. Table 1 provides
information on team composition, communication media, and temporal distribution
for the participating teams. All teams had one formal team leader, while the rest of
the teams’ leadership was more informal.
Team A’s task was to provide technology support and on-site training to customers, whereas Team B focused on delivering products and supporting customers
during the initial usage period of the product. The sub-locations in Teams A and
B operated quite independently within their specific geographical areas providing
services to local customers in their native languages, but team members shared
resources and provided support to each other, working together in a moderately
interdependent manner. Teams A and B used a common information and customer
management tool, which brought transparency to the team both in terms of providing information about customer cases as well as information on who was working
on what. In addition, the teams followed a series of work processes that guided their
work. Team B had weekly global meetings, while Team A lacked meeting routines
and rarely gathered for formal meetings.
Teams C, D and E (from TechAlpha) developed software and worked together in
a highly interdependent manner across sub-locations. They followed the agile work
process Scrum, which is a development process for team tasks consisting of short
iterative rounds, where the team is given significant autonomy to carry out their
tasks in whatever way they find necessary [65]. Scrum consists of a series of
meetings, such as daily status, planning and retrospective meetings, so it requires
intensive communication. In addition, the teams we studied used an issue tracking
management tool (commonly used in Scrum), listing all the team’s tasks and each
member’s current task, to enable task sequencing and delegation. The teams had
two assigned roles: Product Owner (PO) and Scrum Master (SM). The SM facilitated teamwork by removing obstacles, keeping the team focused on the task, and
ensuring that the team adheres to team rules. The PO represented the voice of the
customer and was ultimately responsible for team success or failure. In our sample,
the PO also functioned as the formal team leader.
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
Team
8
7
7
7*
12
10
9
13
Team
size
Software Development
Support
Support
Software Development
Software Development
Software Development
Support
Support
Team Type
Communication technology
Teleconferences, e-mail,
discussion forum, text
messages, customer
management tool
Finland (3 (1L)), Italy (1), US (1
Teleconferences, e-mail,
SL), China (1 SL), Korea (2
discussion forum, text
(1SL)), Japan (1)
messages, customer
management tool
Finland (6 (1L, 1SL)), Romania (3), Video and teleconferences,
India (1)
discussion forum, e-mail, text
messages, issue tracking
management tool
Finland (8 (1L, 1SL)), India (4)
Video and teleconferences,
discussion forum, e-mail, text
messages, issue tracking
management tool
Finland (3 (1L, 1SL)), India (1)
Video and teleconferences,
discussion forum, e-mail, text
messages, issue tracking
management tool
Finland (5), UK (2 (1L))
Teleconferences, e-mail, chat, FTF
ones per month
Finland (3(1L)), UK (2), France (1), Teleconferences, e-mail, chat, FTF
Japan (1)
four times a year
Finland (3(1L)), UK (5(1SL))
Teleconferences, e-mail, chat, FTF
ones per year
Finland (7 (1L, 1SL)), India (2),
China (1), Korea (2), Japan (1)
Locations (and Numbers) of
Interviewed Members
2 hours
6 hours
2 hours
2.5 hours
2.5 hours
2.5 hours
13 hours
6 hours
Temporal
distribution
Notes: *Although the team had altogether seven members (4 in Finland and 3 in India), the team had disbanded before the data collection process; consequently, only
four members were interviewed, due to limited access to the full team at the time the interviews were conducted. The supervisor of the team leaders in team C, D,
and E also provided interview data.
L = appointed leader or product owner; SL = appointed sub-leader or Scrum Master.
A
1
Org.
Table 1. Team Composition Information
IMPLICIT AND BEHAVIORAL LEADERSHIP COORDINATION
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In TechBeta, Team H developed software in a moderately interdependent manner,
but unlike the software teams of TechAlpha, Team H did not follow Scrum, and
rarely held meetings together in the whole team. Instead the two sub-locations met
separately on a daily to weekly basis and communicated primarily through the formal
leader in Finland and a sub-leader in the United Kingdom, acting as bridges between
the two locations. Teams F and G, specialized on specific products and provided
support and input to software development teams, customer support teams and sellers
of the product. Their team members provided: material and guidelines to the customer support area offices; development requirements to the product development
division; and technical support to sales. While Team F had monthly face-to-face
meetings, Team G met face-to-face four times a year. Apart from these meetings,
Team F had sporadic virtual meetings on an as-needed basis. The teams were
moderately interdependent, although dyads within the teams work together interdependently on a daily basis.
The eight teams were chosen based on principles of theoretical sampling [25]
along the following dimensions that seemed important for the experience of shared
leadership in GVTs. The teams worked in a globally dispersed manner (i.e.,
members were located in different countries, and communicated in the GVT mainly
via information and communication technologies, listed in Table 2), and the teams
displayed some degree of shared leadership. Therefore, we selected two companies
with similarities in work cultures; both companies were medium-sized and operated
according to low hierarchical leadership structures. All selected teams consisted of
knowledge workers with interdependent task activities (requiring coordination),
collaborating toward a common goal. We selected the specific teams based on
initial discussion with team leaders and HR-personnel of the companies.
The teams created a spectrum from high to low degree of shared leadership. To
arrive at the degree of shared leadership in each team, we employed network
analysis to uncover the extent to which leadership was shared within each team.
We asked participants to identify who they viewed as leaders in their team. We used
their responses to calculate in-degree centralities for each member within each team
using Freeman’s [22] measure, by counting the number of incoming ties into that
member. Because leadership is about direct influence on others, in-degree centrality
is most appropriate to identify leaders in a network. All measures of “centrality”
(i.e., a network actor level metric) have a counterpart measure of “centralization”
for the whole team network, which measures the distribution of the respective
member centralities across the network. We computed Freeman’s normalized indegree leadership centralization for each team as the sum of the differences between
the largest member centrality score and all other’s within the team, divided by the
maximum possible sum of the differences [70] (i.e., that of a maximally centralized
network with a “star” configuration). This normalized centralization score represents the degree to which leadership is concentrated in one member (i.e.,
a centralization score of 1, representing a “star” network with one “vertical” leader
and everyone else as a follower, left side in Figure 1) or widely distributed (i.e.,
4HPD, 6LPD, TZ 2,5 h
7LPD, TZ 2 h
5HPD, 4LPD, TZ 13 h
4HPD, 8LPD, TZ 2,5 h
4HPD, 3LPD, TZ 2,5 h
2HPD, 5LPD, TZ 6 h
6HPD, 7LPD, TZ 6 h
8LPD, TZ 2 h
Team C
Team F
Team B
Team D
Team E
Team G
Team A
Team H
High
High
Moderate
Moderate
Moderate
Moderate
Low
Low
High
High
Low
Moderate
Low
High
Low
High
High
Low
Moderate
Low
Low
Low
Moderate
Low
Moderate
High*
Moderate
High*
High*
Moderate*
Low
Moderate
Shared Implicit leadership
leadership
coordination
Mechanistic Organic
High
Low
Moderate
Low
Low
Moderate
High
High
Work process
performance
High
Moderate
Moderate
Moderate
Low
Moderate
Low
High
Affective process
performance
Team effectiveness
Notes: *These teams used organic leadership coordination primarily in a reactive fashion, to correct issues due to lack of mechanistic coordination in the team. The
other teams used organic leadership coordination in a proactive fashion, to hinder uncoordinated shared leadership. LPD = low power distance culture; HPD = high
power distance culture, the numbers indicate the amount of members categorized into each category; TZ = the number of time zones spanned by the team.
Global complexity along cultural
and temporal dimensions
Studied
teams
Behavioral leadership
coordination
Table 2. Shared Leadership, Shared Leadership Coordination, and Team Effectiveness Levels
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a centralization score of 0 represents a fully connected and totally decentralized
network with everyone sharing leadership, right side of Figure 1). We observed
shared leadership in all the teams in our sample, but to varying degrees. The
network centralization scores (CS) for each team were: Team A = 0.57; Team
B = 0.41; Team C = 0.29; Team D = 0.39; Team E = 0.42; Team F = 0.19; Team
G = 0.44, Team H = 0.5. From this we concluded that shared leadership was highly
shared in teams C and F (CS < 0.3), moderately shared in teams B, D, E, and G (0.3
< CS < 0.5), and little shared in teams A and H (CS > 0.5).
Data Collection and Analysis
We conducted semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions about members’ experiences with their team’s work routines, communication, team dynamics,
and leadership, including benefits and challenges of the team’s leadership. To
uncover the distribution of leadership within the team, and to better understand
the relationship between leadership and coordination we asked participants to name
the team members they perceived to be most influential in the team and explain
how and why (see network analysis in the previous section). Following Yukl et al.’s
[75, 73] taxonomy of leadership behaviors, we asked members to talk about how
specific leadership behaviors, such as task-oriented (e.g., planning of new tasks,
task-delegation, and scheduling), relations-oriented (e.g., provision of support and
encouragement and consulting other members for decision-making), and changeoriented (e.g., proposing a new strategy to the team) leadership behaviors were
carried out within the team. Each interview lasted between 37 to 128 minutes and
was 64 minutes long on average (resulting in a total of 76 hours of interviews,
1,207 pages, with 568,854 words). All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.
Throughout our research process, we followed the recommendation by Yin [72]
to increase the validity and reliability of our findings. The validity of our findings
has been ensured through 1) several rounds of iterations, 2) validity checks with
informants, participating researchers and external reviewers, 3) cross-case analysis
over multiple cases, and 4) connecting conclusions to existing literature. The
reliability has been ensured by strictly following a case-study protocol as well as
establishing a case study database, which would enable not only replication for
others, but also for ourselves to replicate the same procedures from one case to
another. We report each step taken in the single-case and cross-case analysis next.
First, we analyzed each team in context as a separate case, each providing
a unique “story.” The first step in crafting these stories was to describe the different
practices of shared leadership coordination in each team and then analyze them
inductively. Consistent with an inductive approach [16, 52], we first conducted
open coding of the transcribed data to uncover emerging dominant themes. Using
NVivo [66] we identified terms, concepts, and categories in the data. Next, we
conducted axial coding to relate categories with one another and formed “second
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333
order” categories, representing themes and dimensions of theoretical interest. For
instance, we folded the first-level excerpt “we monitor everyone’s progress over
technology” into the second order category “Mechanistic leadership coordination”
and the first-level excerpt “we collectively shape our vision by discussing in the
team” into the second order category “Organic leadership coordination.” Finally, we
searched for relationships among these second order categories and arrived at our
final aggregate dimensions, “Behavioral leadership coordination” and “Implicit
leadership coordination.” The final coding structure with the emerging themes
about leadership coordination is illustrated in Figure 2. We arrived at this coding
structure through constant comparison of the occurring concepts across all teams.
We assigned a score of low, moderate, or high, depending on how much each type
of coordination process was used in the team, by consensus among the researchers.
Finally, we analyzed the effectiveness of each team. Team effectiveness has commonly been divided into two parts in the management literature; performance (e.g.,
quality and quantity) and members’ affective reactions (e.g., satisfaction and commitment) [49]. In the context of IS teams, performance outcomes have commonly been
divided into process performance (including affective outcomes) and product performance [13]. In this study, we focus on process performance specifically and measure it
consistent with prior IS research (e.g., [13, 57]) by asking members and leaders
questions about how well the team achieved outcomes on-time, in line with team
goals, and with overall efficiency (which we label work process performance) and how
satisfied members were with their team and their tasks (which we label affective
process performance). We separated these two into two process performance categories
because we found that the various shared leadership coordination types had separate
effects on affective- and work process performance. In this analysis, we grouped first-
Coding Structure
1st Order Concepts
2nd Order Themes
We use a tool for work allocation
Our work processes forces people to bring forth
problems
Continuous improvement is built in our process
Mechanistic
leadership
coordination
During meetings we make decisions together
Meetings brings transparency into what everyone is
doing
Organic
leadership
coordination
It doesn’t bother them what I try to say
They are unsure about who the leader is
Everyone can voice their opinion and influence
Although Annika is my supervisor I can still go and ask,
hey could you do this for me
It’s not possible that a member participate in leadership
Perceived
legitimacy of
emergent leader
shared in the team
Own perceived
legitimacy
Aggregate Dimensions
Behavioral
leadership
coordination
Implicit
leadership
coordination
Figure 2. Coding structure.
Note: Data representation format was inspired by the Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton [24]
“Gioia Methodology.”
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level codes such as “The team performs its work on time” and “The team performs its
work aligned with its goals” under the second level code “Work process performance,”
and first-level codes such as “I am satisfied with my team and our work” and “I am
more motivated when no one tells me what to do all the time” under the second-level
code “Affective process performance.” These two second level codes together formed
the aggregate dimension “Team effectiveness.” In this analysis, team effectiveness was
also ranked as low, moderate, or high (see Table 2), by consensus from the participating
researchers. A score of low in terms of work process performance was given if the team
had substantial problems with staying on track, had big delays, and overall worked
inefficiently, while a score of high was given if the team worked in alignment with their
goals, with no delays, and with high efficiency. A score of moderate was given to teams
falling somewhere in between. Similarly, for affective process performance a score of
high, moderate, or low was based on how satisfied and motivated the team members
were in the team. We further validated our interpretations by presenting the results and
ideas to the study participants and getting their feedback on the analysis [16, 52], and
for work process performance, we specifically asked the formal team leaders for their
evaluation to validate our own interpretations.
We noticed differences in implicit leadership coordination based on members’
national cultural dimension power distance [35]. Since the effects of cultural norms
are stronger and more accurate when measured at the individual level [67], we did
not automatically assign a value of low or high due to members’ country of origin.
Instead, we assessed power distance values through interview questions directly
with the team members, which increased the validity of our measurement. We
categorized each member’s power distance as high or low, based on their own
reports of how they reasoned around people in higher positions, related to status
differences and decision-making power [35]. First order codes related to low power
distance included “Here, we are all on the same level,” and first order codes related
to high power distance included “It’s not possible for a member to participate in
leadership.” After categorized each individual, we investigated each team in detail
to see how power distance influenced leadership coordination.
After the single team case analyses, we performed comparative thematic analysis
across all eight cases. The single cases revealed the unique team patterns and amounts
of shared leadership coordination in each team and, in all cases shared leadership had
an impact on team effectiveness, but it varied depending on how well the team
coordinated its shared leadership activities. We used these differences in our comparative multi-case study. As recommended by Eisenhardt [16], we looked for patterns of
within-case similarities and cross-case differences by comparing the leadership coordination mechanisms in each team and how they subsequently related to team effectiveness. These comparisons enabled us to reconcile why shared leadership had
differing effects on team effectiveness in different teams, and the explanation always
centered on how shared leadership was coordinated within each team. For instance, we
were able to trace differences in the underlying reasons for and how teams used
organic leadership coordination. Some teams used it in a proactive fashion to build
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awareness and a rhythm for leadership to take place, while others used it in a more
reactive fashion to correct issues due to lack of mechanistic coordination in the team
(see * in Table 2). The effect on team effectiveness differed among these. The
following section reports the results of our cross-case analysis. The names of participants (in quotes) have been changed to pseudonyms to ensure confidentiality.
Results
Our results provide a nuanced understanding on how GVTs coordinate shared
leadership. Table 2 provides an overview of the levels of shared leadership, shared
leadership coordination mechanisms, and team effectiveness in each team. It also
lists the amount of low and high power-distance members as well as time zone span
in each team. In what follows, we describe how the studied teams coordinated their
leadership implicitly and behaviorally, and link these to team effectiveness.
Shared Leadership Coordination
Leadership coordination is about managing dependencies among the various leadership behaviors distributed across the team into a coherent leadership whole. Implicit
leadership coordination is about members sharing same perceptions or cognitive
schemas about who has leadership over what. In turn, behavioral leadership coordination is associated with actions aimed towards more synchronized and aligned
with team goals and outcomes.
Implicit Leadership Coordination
Implicit leadership coordination had an impact on both work- and affective processperformance. Implicit leadership coordination was often mentioned to affect the
effectiveness of leadership influence, as a member in Team B commented:
It is visible in the Asian culture, like when I am not anybody’s formal leader,
it doesn’t bother them much what I am trying to say. The directive has to
come from someone being their boss so that they would take it seriously.
Different perceptions of the team’s leadership structure among members can
hence be wasteful when followers are not accustomed to take orders from other
team members or do not know which leaders to follow. This happened in teams A,
B and E in particular. The leader of Team B commented on how important knowing
who one’s leader was, especially for members accustomed to vertical leadership:
It has been a bit blurry on who is whose leader for the Asian members, which
has caused a lot of confusion and bad climate at their local offices. Not
knowing clearly who your leader is seems to have a much bigger influence on
them than it has here [in Finland].
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In other words, Asian members expected more formal leader roles, but Finnish
members established a more informal shared leadership structure, which was not
well received by Asians, leaving some Finnish members feeling powerless.
Consequently, lack of implicit leadership coordination was common in GVTs
with a mix of high and low power distance members, leading to lower satisfaction
in the team.
Conversely, most low power distance culture members did not perceive the
formal role of the leader to be as important and accepted shared leadership more
readily. A member of Team A described how he had just found out about who his
immediate leader was:
His title came quite as a surprise a few months ago when he [a team member]
had been named as our sub team leader … I was just like, okay haha
[laughing]… and this shows how important titles are in Finland, they don’t
play a big role. I don’t even anticipate that he will begin to take any more
leadership responsibility.
Interestingly, no one in the Finnish team recognized that a recent introduction of this
local sub-leader in Team A and B would have changed the team’s leadership. Instead,
the common view among Finnish members was aligned with the following comment
from a Finnish team member: “Anyone who has a good argument has influence on the
team, independent on his or her position.” Furthermore, another Finnish member in
Team A explained his relationship to the formal team leader: “Although Annika is my
leader I can still go and ask, hey could you do this for me … Although she is in a leader
position, we are still pretty much in the same boat.” This demonstrates how anyone is
able to influence (and willing to be influenced by) others in the team without the need
for leadership roles to be clearly defined or designated. Low-power distance team
members (such as the Finnish members) were thus more likely to have an implicit
coordination cognitive schema assuming and accepting shared leadership from the
outset. In contrast, higher power distance team members were more likely to have an
implicit coordination cognitive schema centered on vertical leadership. Such differences in leadership perceptions led to dissatisfaction to both sides, and also to process
losses because a considerable amount of time was spent on processing misunderstandings and duplication of efforts. In Team E, which had low implicit leadership coordination, an Indian member commented on the perceptional differences:
We had been asking too many questions and directives from Finnish people,
so they were getting [mad (edited)] because of that, since they had to spend
a lot of time guiding us… but they had the PO, they had the Scrum Master in
their site, so it was a natural choice to us.
The Finnish members of this team in turn reported how they did not want to offer
all the leadership, as they expected the Indian members to participate in leadership
themselves:
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We did not want to do that, because we are a self-managed team… But what
happened is that a few members from Finland ended up having to constantly
be in contact with them and offer leadership. This led to frustrations and
decreased productivity for these persons.
Overall, this was problematic for Finnish members because they perceived distant
team members to slowing things down. In turn, Indian members saw this as
problematic because they were not comfortable sharing leadership, and cited
insecurity and doubts in their own legitimacy as their main concerns. Such difference in role expectations and a lack of implicit leadership coordination led to both
work- and affective process performance losses.
In general, the majority of members in high power distance cultures gravitated to
persons they perceived closest to them, before enacting any leadership activities. In
Team B, for instance, Finnish members described how Asian team members tended
to turn to them to suggest a change to a leader: “Sometimes you get these questions
like ‘I have been thinking about a change suggestion a little, is it okay if I ask Tapio
[team leader] about it?’” Similarly, in Team D, the Scrum Master explained about
his Indian team members: “They are a bit unsure about who the leader is…and they
are afraid that we will go on to complain to someone they don’t know if they are
not taking care of their tasks properly.” As a result, the Indian members generally
relied on leadership from a senior member locally, who often then escalated the
issue to the Finnish site. This sometimes caused a day of delay due to time zone
differences.
Considering that many members of Teams A, B, D, and E had years of
experience working together, the limited direct influence and alternative routes
of communication suggested a lack of implicit leadership coordination in the
team, with members having different perceptions on who were allowed to
participate in leadership. As members became bridges between different persons,
the result was an unnecessary long chain of leadership communication. These
bridging activities often consumed a lot of time and frustration among everyone
involved, providing evidence of how lack of implicit leadership coordination
results in diminished process performance, both in terms of work- and affective
process performance (see Table 2).
In contrast, in GVTs with an implicitly coordinated shared leadership, team
members freely participated in leadership, and contacted the person who was
most likely to have the knowledge to answer their request and this did not differ
by role or location. Team C is a good example of successful implicit leadership
coordination, where all members (independent of their culture) expected leadership
to be shared, as this Indian member commented:
If I have a problem that needs to be solved in let’s say a few hours, it doesn’t
matter who I ask, everybody answer[s] the same… and in influencing decisions there is no difference, everyone who has the strongest and more
concrete opinions gets taken into account.
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This shows that a mix of high and low power distance cultures in the team matter less
for shared leadership, when the GVT is able to implicitly coordinate its shared leadership. But while Team C, G and H with high implicit leadership coordination demonstrated high levels of team effectiveness, other teams did not (see Table 2), especially
Team F. The difference is explained in the next section by the level to which the shared
leadership is being behaviorally coordinated, on top of being implicitly coordinated.
Behavioral Leadership Coordination
Behavioral leadership coordination is concerned with the explicit actions aimed at
coordinating the leadership activities taking place, and was needed in addition to
implicit leadership coordination. For example, Team F had implicitly coordinated
shared leadership perceptions; yet, this team’s shared leadership was not efficient,
due to the uncoordinated nature of leadership activities resulting in work redundancies, as a team member described: “Anders was supposed to manage my
resources … like prioritize for me, but now it’s just messy… I really don’t know
who to take on tasks from and when.” Anders again explained:
Suddenly … he [Mikko] is working on something completely different than
we agreed upon and tells me that Benjamin [the team leader] told me that
I should do this now,’ and I am like hey why did I not get informed. This is
very confusing and not a sustainable solution.
This comment illustrates how low behavioral leadership coordination can result in
conflicting leadership actions, resulting in reduced team effectiveness through
delays and confusions that demotivates team members further from engaging in
shared leadership.
Naturally, the need for behavioral leadership coordination varied depending on
the degree of distribution of leadership across team boundaries. If only one or a few
persons handled all leadership in the team, then there was little need for behavioral
leadership coordination. For instance, in Teams A, and H, which were characterized
by more vertical leadership structures, we did not observe a strong need for
behavioral leadership coordination (see Table 2) for the team to be effective. The
few persons who participated in leadership were able to synchronize their efforts
appropriately. Conversely, for the GVTs with largely shared leadership across
temporal and spatial boundaries, there was a stronger need for behavioral leadership
coordination. As we discuss next, behavioral leadership coordination can be
achieved both through mechanistic as well as organic coordination, often through
a combination of both.
Mechanistic Leadership Coordination
Mechanistic leadership coordination is about managing the dependencies among
leadership behaviors through plans, programs and artifacts. Team C and D were
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both following the Scrum work process and hence held daily scrums and other
Scrum meetings. They used an issue tracking management tool (ITMT), which
facilitated transparency within the team. Especially Team C was able to take
advantage of these for coordinating the team’s shared leadership, which an Indian
member explains:
All our work tasks are described here [ITMT], you see who is working on
what and what the progress of the work is, and if a task requires someone to
do testing. For work allocation it’s an excellent tool and it hinders duplicate
work allocation … although we have decided that all work is open to anyone.
Even though people have special areas of expertise it is good in the long run
if people does a little bit of everything.
A Romanian member of Team C described how task delegation had become
more mechanistic and empowered by technology: “Earlier we had the leader
helping us with [a task assignment], but now … we have a backlog [in the
ITMT] and each one starts picking from it, which is really efficient.” This
illustrates how mechanistic coordination through defined processes and technology helps teams carry out task leadership functions, such as delegation and work
sequencing [75, 73] with minimal coordination costs. The functionality and widespread use of the ITMT tool made duplication of leadership behaviors less likely,
fostering effective behavioral leadership coordination. For instance, two members
could not assign the same task to different persons simultaneously, nor could
a person delegate any other tasks to the team than those that had been agreed
upon. These same problems were prevented in Team A and B through the use of
customer support tools used to handle assignment and scheduling of cases. In
addition to offering highly effective ways to tackle temporal and spatial dispersion, mechanistic leadership coordination also helped Team C (and to a lower
degree in Team D) to legitimize their shared leadership. As a result of shared
leadership becoming the expected norm in the team, the team’s implicit leadership
coordination was improved. Several members explained that the Scrum work
process and their ITMTs empowered them to participate in shared leadership,
which they would not have done if following their own high-power distance
cultural norms.
In contrast, lack of mechanistic leadership coordination was noticeable in teams
D, E, and H which had a few members either refusing the Scrum process and
tools, or not realizing that they were not adhering to the established process rules,
and in teams F and G where members completed task activities more independently, forgetting to inform their cross-site colleagues about them (see Table 2).
The formal leader of Team D outlined how it was difficult to know if distant team
members were actually working on things they were supposed to, as they did not
rely on the ITMT tool to share information about their respective independent
decisions:
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One guy sometimes informs like, “hey now I have developed this kind of
thing” … But I would rather hear about the issue beforehand … Sometimes
things get out of hand and sometimes … a member has worked for weeks on
another issue than he informed us about.
In turn, such reduced transparency impaired the team’s effectiveness when members were unable to prioritize the right tasks in line with the team’s goals. Team
D also had a few members who were reluctant to work according to Scrum. The
frustrated Scrum Master talked about this:
It doesn’t matter whoever decides, they don’t follow the process, but does
what they want … A lot of problems arise from that, for example, how can
we know when something is getting ready? Like we don’t necessary know
what they have been up to … and then suddenly the work pops up and we
need to be ready to take care of the testing.
He also discussed how this led to additional effort to check upon team members,
increasing coordination costs. Lack of mechanistic leadership coordination also
explained why teams with highly shared leadership, such as Teams F and G,
experienced work process performance losses. Since the team had no processes
or technologies to facilitate the transparency of leadership actions in the team, the
team often displayed redundant leadership, which was sometimes misaligned with
the team’s goals, which in turn delayed the team’s other important work. In addition
to a lack of mechanistic leadership coordination, the team rarely coordinated
leadership actions organically through communication in a proactive fashion,
which further decreased the team’s effectiveness. We discuss this in the next
section.
Organic leadership coordination
Organic leadership coordination is about managing the dependencies among leadership activities through communication. This coordination was either proactive (i.e.,
focused on future actions) or reactive (i.e., focused on past actions). Organic
leadership coordination took place primarily through formal of ad-hoc meetings,
where team members discussed their work and aligned their intended or past
leadership actions. During these meetings, team members could make decisions
together, increasing the likelihood for the team to move forward in the same
direction. Several members from each team pointed out that their team was able
to achieve their goals better when the team considered opinions from more persons,
and decisions were influenced by expertise rather than by a person’s position in the
company. As a member of Team C explained: “A team has more experience … so
it’s good to let the team decide. Because in the end, if one person’s idea is not good,
then we have counter arguments.”
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Another member of Team C mentioned how in his old company, decisions tended
to come down from the top, which made him question the quality of those decisions.
This also lowered his motivation and commitment to the task and team. Therefore,
including members in leadership through discussions kept the team moving forward
in the right direction, “doing the right things,” as well as kept members satisfied.
Furthermore, making decisions together helped reduce work process performance
losses resulting from individual leadership actions that were duplicated or misaligned
with team goals, delaying the work. Organic leadership coordination thus fostered
awareness of and inclusion in the team’s shared leadership.
Lack of organic coordination was visible especially in Team A (and in Team
H with moderate level of organic coordination) where the teams rarely met as
a whole. In Team A and H, this did not cause problems because their leadership was
shared the least (see Table 2). Nor did a moderate level of organic leadership
coordination cause reduced process performance in Team C, due to the heavy
reliance on mechanistic leadership coordination, reducing the need for organic
leadership coordination. On the other hand, a high amount of reactive organic
leadership coordination was highly problematic in Teams D, E, F, and G since
the teams had little mechanistic leadership coordination in place. Hence, situations
in which members performed duplicate leadership actions in conflicting directions
often took place, as this comment from a member in Team G illustrates:
Sometimes you hear that a team member went to visit some company and
then you are like, hmm, I was in that company the previous week, maybe we
could have done it together? So it would be interesting to hear what folks are
planning and in which projects they are being involved. Then it would be
easier to sometimes coordinate … Now I don’t know for instance if we have
communicated a fragmented picture of our company to the customer.
In other words, too much freedom in sharing the lead, led members of this team to
make independent decisions without consulting each other. As this member of
Team G further explained, many times members portrayed conflicting stories to
external stakeholders, which they then later had to correct. Since there was no clear
division between who took care of what leadership among this team’s members
(and similarly in Team D, E, and F), and since they often neglected to proactively
coordinate their leadership actions, this resulted in confusion and extra time spent
on reactive organic leadership coordination (i.e., losses in process performance).
Reliance on Mechanistic and Organic Leadership Coordination Together
The amount of mechanistic leadership coordination in the team influenced the need for
organic leadership coordination. When a team lacked mechanistic leadership coordination (at least to some degree), as in Team D, E, F, and G (see Table 2), these teams
commonly had to sort out their issues resulting from uncoordinated shared leadership
with reactive organic leadership coordination. This led to decreased process
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performance due to things like additional back and forth communication, work delays,
and dissatisfied team members. In contrast, teams such as Team A, B, C, and H (see
Table 2) relied on proactive organic leadership coordination, in addition to mechanistic,
to increase transparency in the team and to lower the risk for the team’s leadership to
become uncoordinated. In general, there were less process performance losses in the
teams that relied on organic leadership coordination in a proactive manner, and their
team effectiveness was consistently higher. This was exemplified in Team C in particular, where shared leadership had the strongest positive impact on team effectiveness.
Mechanistic leadership coordination in this team, not only decreased the need for, but
also enhanced the effectiveness of proactive organic leadership coordination by providing a rhythm and a forum for the less-routine aspects of leadership. Several
members of Team C commented on this, for example:
Our processes force people to bring forth problems, like I have myself
a tendency to get stuck on a difficult task for several days … but in Scrum
everyone every day has to bring forth what they are working on and tell about
their problems.
Similarly, members talked about how change leadership was facilitated through
biweekly meetings where the aim was to work together to make suggestions and
decide upon changes to the team’s work practices. Hence, mechanistic leadership
coordination helped facilitate continuity to organic leadership coordination in
a proactive manner. On the contrary, when all members did not follow processes
and did not use technology (e.g., Team D and E), reactive organic leadership
coordination was used and necessary to account for the absence of mechanistic
leadership coordination. This was evident in Team D, which had a few detractors
refusing to follow the Scrum process, leading the Scrum Master to always check in
on members: “I always have to call them separately, to see what’s going on.” This
resulted in lower team effectiveness because much time was spent on extra communication, causing substantial coordination costs and reduced time for the Scrum
Master to engage in software production himself to meet the team’s deadlines.
Similarly, in TechBeta, Teams F and G have a minimum number of meetings and
most communication was ad hoc, one-on-one. Members often forgot to communicate
about their intended leadership actions before carrying them out. Considering that
neither of these teams engaged in any mechanistic leadership coordination, this resulted
in a lack of global awareness in the teams and uncoordinated shared leadership, with
redundant leadership actions, sometimes causing confusion, not only to those participating in leadership, but also to the followers. As a consequence, the teams’ process
performance suffered.
Discussion
Our study was motivated by the unresolved conflicts in empirical studies on the
effects of shared leadership on GVT effectiveness, with many studies reporting
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343
positive effects while others showing detrimental effects (e.g., [15, 32, 63]). Our
results resolve this conflict in the literature by confirming that when leadership
is distributed and uncoordinated it can lead to detrimental effects. We found
empirical evidence that when leadership is shared it creates leadership dependencies among leadership actions, which need to be coordinated for shared
leadership to leverage its benefits for team effectiveness. Previous research
[54, 63] has theorized about the potential relationship between shared leadership
and task coordination, and preliminary research [33] has found that shared
leadership improves team effectiveness when task coordination is low. But
prior findings do not recognize the additional dependencies created by the
shared leadership itself. Our study extends this previous research by integrating
leadership coordination into the equation. Naturally, when tasks are uncoordinated in GVTs, effective leadership can fill this void [43], but our study
demonstrates that the leadership activities themselves need to be coordinated
to leverage the benefits of shared leadership.
By introducing the concept of shared leadership coordination, conceptualized into
implicit and behavioral components, this work contributes to management information systems and organizational research in general by providing a more nuanced
understanding of the relationship between shared leadership, shared leadership coordination, and team effectiveness. In line with what can be expected based on
coordination theory [44], we found that shared leadership may increase coordination
costs, while reducing production and vulnerability costs, affecting team effectiveness.
However, more specifically, we found that the magnitude of these costs depended on
the team’s ability to coordinate its shared leadership through implicit and behavioral
leadership coordination in several important ways. First, with low implicit leadership
coordination, vulnerability costs are likely to be high, as leadership influence may fail
when it shifts from one member to another and members have different perceptions
of who has leadership over what. Second, coordination costs (e.g., delays) are likely
to be high in teams with low implicit leadership coordination and low mechanistic
leadership coordination, because they will require costly reactive organic leadership
coordination to compensate for such deficiency.
On the other hand, reliance on mechanistic leadership coordination is likely to
reduce coordination costs powerfully to the following two reasons. First, there is
less need for organic leadership coordination for routine aspects of shared leadership, including task related leadership, which is especially beneficial for GVTs with
spatial and temporal distance having reduced opportunities for synchronous
communication. Second, organic leadership coordination can be used in a more
proactive way to create continuity for less routine aspects of shared leadership,
including change related leadership.
Finally, production costs are likely to rise when mechanistic and proactive
organic leadership coordination are low due to things like delays, duplication of
work and re-work. With a right mix of shared leadership coordination mechanisms,
total costs will be reduced, making GVTs more effective. Our study contributes to
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the literature by being the first one to find empirical support for this, and by
introducing the distinction of proactive vs reactive use of organic leadership
coordination.
Prior research has acknowledged the importance of leaders viewing other leaders as
such for shared leadership to be effective [50, 51]. But there has been little attention
to the role of followers who, along with emergent and designated leaders, are an
integral part of the shared leadership structure in a team. Our work extends these
endeavors by showing the importance of followers and leaders to have aligned
perceptions of who the leaders are in the GVT for shared leadership to reap its
potential benefits. This perspective is particularly important in GVTs in which single,
vertical leadership is difficult due to communication barriers resulting from distance
[1] and due to differing leadership expectations [76]. We found that GVTs with a mix
of low and high power distance members commonly lacked implicit leadership
coordination, with some members continuing to operate under vertical leadership,
and others under shared leadership. This lack of implicit coordination caused process
losses in the team’s performance, as well as dissatisfaction among leaders and
members alike. In GVTs with an implicitly coordinated shared leadership structure
in turn, cultural differences mattered less, and leadership actions were more likely to
be understood, agreed upon and followed, increasing the team’s effectiveness.
This study further extends previous research by showing that having an implicitly
coordinated shared leadership structure is not enough for improving team effectiveness. Leadership actions also need to be coordinated behaviorally, which is
a dimension that has not been effectively acknowledged before. In particular, we
show how behavioral leadership coordination facilitates task leadership functions
effectively when the team is able to rely on mechanistic leadership coordination as
much as possible, e.g. through the use of technology and predefined work processes.
Consistent with prior research [17, 68], we show that coordination is cost effective
when the team can rely on mechanistic coordination to manage the respective
dependencies among leadership behaviors, such as organizing, delegating, among
others. In addition, we show how GVTs use mechanistic leadership coordination to
facilitate or enhance proactive organic leadership coordination. In sum, our findings
show how mechanistic artifacts like technology and work processes, which have been
viewed as substitutes for leadership in the past [39] may not be just that, but actually
facilitate shared leadership. This is consistent with recent research which shows that
IT may facilitate team processes, for instance, by enabling coordination of expertise
[21, 28] and boundary spanning collaborations [2]. These results are good news for
GVTs, who may empower their shared leadership coordination with mechanistic
artifacts, as team communication is difficult due to temporal and spatial distance [48].
Implications for Practice
Despite the seemingly consistent positive promises of shared leadership in previous
research, the empirical evidence is mixed. Managers need to be aware that sharing
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leadership responsibilities can cause the team to become uncoordinated and ineffective [14, 17] if the actions of leaders are not in synch. This can result in
frustration, duplication of work, delays and the need for rework, among other
things. But with the right mix of leadership coordination mechanisms the team
can synchronize their leadership actions and act as a cohesive whole leading to
superior performance. These are good news for practitioners who have seen
a proliferation of self-managed teams, which emphasize leadership originating
from within a team.
Practitioners also need to be aware that an appropriate mix of mechanistic and
organic coordination processes can help teams coordinate their shared leadership
effectively. Mechanistic leadership coordination increases transparency in the team
and decreases the need for costly organic leadership coordination. At the same time,
proactive organic leadership coordination can foster more effective implicit leadership coordination due to stronger shared cognition and understanding of practices.
Furthermore, given the unpredictable nature of work in GVTs, proactive organic
coordination through communication among multiple leaders is also necessary to
synchronize their respective leadership actions.
As the cultural diversity in a GVT increases, it becomes more important to
facilitate implicit leadership coordination within the team, as the acceptance of
a leader’s influence may be rooted in cultural values (e.g., power distance [29, 35]),
as well as in organizational culture. In line with Kankanhalli and colleagues [37],
we also found that cultural diversity in GVTs is likely to contribute to task and
relationship conflict when implicit leadership coordination is low. These findings
have implications for leaders and team members of GVTs, who need to influence
each other over temporal, geographic and cultural distance. Perceiving each other as
legitimate leaders is vital for the influence attempt to be effective. Leaders may
evoke shared understanding in heterogeneous GVTs by supporting them more
systematically aiming to better integrate members’ individual understanding into
a shared understanding [4].
Limitations and Future Research
This study is not without limitations. First, as with any qualitative study, our
findings might not generalize to other organizational contexts. However, our results
are applicable to similar organizations with GVTs working in knowledge tasks, with
team’s displaying varying degrees of shared leadership. Nevertheless, further
research is needed in this area. While we did not find any differences in results
with regards to task-type or level of task interdependence, we acknowledge that
these might have an impact on the studied phenomenon. The lack of differential
effects in the two task types in our sample however provides some assurance that
our findings are applicable to more than one task. Another limitation is that this
study does not account for the longevity of the team and the resulting team
346
NORDBÄCK AND ESPINOSA
members’ familiarity with each other, which might have substantial impact on team
processes, and needs to be studied more in future research.
Further related quantitative studies can not only help validate and triangulate the
findings of our qualitative study, but can also help us understand whether different
proportions of implicit and behavioral shared leadership coordination make
a difference in enhancing team effectiveness. It is possible that different combinations of implicit, mechanistic and organic leadership coordination leads to similar
outcomes, or that a different mix of coordination methods are more effective for
a given team context. For example, we know from prior research [14] that the mix
of coordination process types varies widely from team to team and that the specific
mix is more a matter of preference. In addition, recent research suggests that
vertical leadership may counterbalance shared leadership, for instance, by helping
the team to coordinate from ideation towards conclusions [36]. Hence, future
research would be useful to help us understand how vertical and emergent leaders
together engage in shared leadership coordination.
Moreover, future studies need to dig deeper into the structural underpinnings of
shared leadership to tease out how the shared leadership distribution over global
boundaries influence team effectiveness. It is time to incorporate other contextual
factors than national culture, for instance, organizational culture which may differ
across sites, when studying the interrelation among shared leadership, leadership
coordination and GVT effectiveness. Future research should also theorize about
other conditions under which shared leadership enhances GVT effectiveness and
those that undermine it. We offered initial insights to this, by introducing leadership
coordination but there might be other important factors as well.
Conclusions
In conclusion, our study underscores the value of devoting further attention to study
the relationship between shared leadership and intervening team processes in
contributing to organizational outcomes. By offering leadership coordination as
one intervening team process, and by providing a nuanced understanding of the
complex nature of shared leadership and the coordination of it in GVTs operating
over global boundaries, we expect that this study will help advance theory and
practice. We have showed that solely positive outcomes are not to be expected from
shared leadership in GVTs. When leadership is highly shared in the team and
uncoordinated, it may actually lead to detrimental effects in terms of lower team
effectiveness. If coordinated, in turn, shared leadership may reap its potential
benefits. Our results provide evidence that the effectiveness of GVTs depends on
the team’s ability to coordinate their leadership actions, through implicit and
behavioral leadership coordination. When coordinated, shared leadership can help
GVTs overcome other task coordination problems, as well as leading to more
satisfied team members. Behavioral leadership coordination may take place through
organic communication, as well as through mechanistic artifacts like technology
IMPLICIT AND BEHAVIORAL LEADERSHIP COORDINATION
347
and work processes. While we found initial evidence that these mechanistic artifacts me be especially powerful tools for facilitating leadership coordination in
GVTs, we believe that this is just the beginning of what is to be seen in an age of
digitalization. A growing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence will
likely alter work and organizations in impactful ways, including taking on a more
performative role in the future [20], even in leadership.
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ENFORCING INFORMATION SECURITY POLICIES
THROUGH CULTURAL BOUNDARIES:
A MULTINATIONAL COMPANY APPROACH
Yayla, Ali Alper, School of Management, PO Box 6000, Binghamton University-SUNY,
Binghamton, NY, 13902, USA, ayayla@binghamton.edu
Abstract
Information security policies can be considered as guidelines and used as a starting point to create a
security structure within an organization. Although practitioners continuously emphasize the
importance of such policies, information system scholars have not paid the required attention to this
context from the cross-cultural perspective. The purpose of this study is to look at the cultural and
institutional differences of a multinational company (MNC) and its subsidiaries, and discuss how these
differences affect the MNC’s strategy to enforce corporate information security policies to its
subsidiaries in different cultural settings. The proposed framework considers the effects of the cultural
distance, national economy, institutional distance, and stickiness of the knowledge transfer on the
process of enforcing information security policies from the parent company to its subsidiaries.
Keywords: Information security, Information security policy, Cultural distance, Institutional distance,
Knowledge transfer, Stickiness
1
Introduction
Today, ensuring availability, integrity and confidentiality of information and data concerns many
organizations. Deterrence can be one of the initial steps that organizations can take to ensure
information security (Straub and Welke, 1998). However, successful deterrence depends on
organization’s ability to control its environment with respect to internal and external threats.
Information security policies define the nature of these controls (i.e., technical, formal and informal
controls) and how these controls complement each other (Dhillon, 1999).
Moreover, security policies govern how organizations’ information should be protected (Kabay, 2002;
Barman, 2002). Whitman (2004) posits that a good security policy needs to “outline individual
responsibilities, define authorized and unauthorized uses of the systems, provide venues for employee
reporting of identified or suspects threats to the system, define penalties for violations, and provide a
mechanism for updating policy” (p.52). Enforcing corporate security policies has been reported as one
of the most effective ways to prevent or reduce electronic crime (Gordon et al., 2004). Overall,
security policies can be considered as guidelines and can be used as a starting point for creating a
security structure within an organization (Whitman, 2004).
The nature of multinational companies (MNCs) adds a layer of complexity to enforcing security
policies because MNCs need to consider the effects of different cultural and organizational settings
and integrate these in their corporate security policies. Basing his arguments on Hofstede’s cultural
dimensions, Abdul-Gader (1997) emphasized culture as one of the most important environmental
factors that MNCs should consider while adopting global Information Systems (IS) policies in Arab
Gulf countries. He postulated that misconceptions of understanding about fate in the Islamic context
and the technical capability of the Arab language are some of the issues that need to be considered by
MNCs. However, management practices do not have to be different just because subsidiaries and
parent company are in different countries and cultural settings. In their study, for instance, Anakwe et
al. (2000) concluded that organizational support enhances microcomputer usage in Nigeria. Their
result found support in other studies which demonstrated that similar management practices can be
effective in different cultural settings (Igbaria, et al. 1995; Igbaria, 1992).
Although practitioners continuously emphasize the importance of security policies, IS scholars have
not paid the required attention to this context from the cross-cultural perspective. For instance, in their
citation analysis of IS articles, Ford et al. (2003) found 57 articles about various contexts of IS that
cited Hofstede’s research on national culture. Further analyses showed that IS Management area led
with 25 articles. Within this research stream, however, no study cited Hofstede’s work in the IS Risk
Management context.
We aim to fulfil this gap by looking at cultural and institutional differences of an MNC and its
subsidiaries and by investigating how these differences affect the MNC’s strategy to enforce corporate
security policies to its subsidiaries in different cultural settings. More specifically, we will discuss
cultural distance, institutional distance, and the stickiness of the knowledge transfer and offer series of
propositions. Our goal is to make a unique contribution to the IS security literature by focusing on the
issues to be considered while enforcing information security policies within the MNC framework.
2
Theoretical Framework
According to Minbaeva et al. (2003), MNCs can develop knowledge in one location and exploit it in
another location through internal transfer of knowledge. One way of creating competitive advantage
for MNCs is effectively sharing organizational practices (Jensen and Szulanski, 2004). For example, in
the strategy literature, organizational practices and routines are considered as important sources of
competitive advantage since these assets are difficult to replicate (Jensen and Szulanski, 2004).
Considering that organizational know-how is an important part of a MNC’s global integration strategy,
its competitive advantage partly resides in the effectiveness of sharing these practices and routines.
MNCs are generally under different external and internal pressures. Externally, MNCs have to
consider the institutional, cultural, and economic environments in multiple countries and have to be
isomorphic with the local institutional environment to maintain their legitimacy (Kostova and Roth,
2002). Establishing and maintaining legitimacy in their multiple host environments is critical for
companies that span various countries (Kostova and Zaheer, 1999). Internally, MNCs have to create
consistency among their subsidiaries by leveraging activities worldwide to retain their competitive
advantages (Kostova and Roth, 2002).
We postulate that the process of enforcing information security policies to subsidiary companies
would be affected by the cultural and institutional distances between the parent company and the
subsidiary company. Moreover, the stickiness of the information security context would further affect
this process. Figure 1 presents the framework of our study.
Cultural
Distance
Parent
Company
Institutional
Distance
Enforcing Information Security Policies
Subsidiary
Company
Stickiness
Figure 1: The proposed framework for enforcing information security policies in multinational
companies
The main goal of information security policies is to provide a set of rules and guidelines to protect the
organization from security breaches. Under the umbrella of this goal, organizations can have variety of
security policies addressing different issues such as identification and authorization, Internet access,
contingency planning, and even social networking. Although MNCs can span across continents, the
interconnectedness of IT emphasizes the importance of enforcing information security policies…
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