A Qualitative Approach to Explore Team Leadership in Different Environments

Abstract: Team leadership is critical for the success of teamwork as it promotes motivation and coordination among team members (Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014; Zaccaro et al., 2001). For example, a recent study found the important impact of leadership on virtual team members’ engagement level (Mutha & Srivastava, 2021). However, leadership is a complex process; a team leader may demonstrate many effective leadership behaviors that traditional leadership styles such as transformational leadership or transactional leadership fail to capture (Burke et al., 2011). In this paper, we focus on a topic that has been overlooked in the literature covering team leadership, specifically, how team leaders function differently in physical and virtual environments.
The quasi-experiment study involved 27 participants (male = 17 and female = 10). Participants were recruited through the Texas A&M University listservs after approval from the Institutional Review Board and were scheduled on a first come first serve basis. Each participant was rewarded with a $10 Amazon gift card. Table 1 shows descriptive statistics for the participants.Groups were created based on participant availability with the least being 3 people per group and the most being 4 people. Participants were assigned the task of discussing a solution for two global issues, the global water shortage and global warming, for 25 minutes. Participants were asked at the end of their discussion to present their solution for the global issue to a researcher. All sessions were audio and video recorded. The study lasted approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes.For data collection purposes each session was video, and audio recorded. For the face-to-face session two cameras were placed at two different angles with an audio recorder in the center of the group of participants to catch any audio that the cameras could not pick up. For the Zoom session the recording feature was used to video record (See Figure 1). A total of sixteen (2 for each team), 30-minute-long videos were collected totaling 480 minutes. Qualitative analysis was conducted on the videos by the research team using the qualitative data analysis software MaxQDA.We quantified our qualitative data to observe patterns in frequency amongst the leadership function action phase incidents. To calculate the overall frequency of codes researchers took the total count of each leadership function action phase category and divided it by the total count of overall leadership function action phase codes for each condition (e.g., face-to-face, and virtual) then multiplied by 100 for a percentage. Groups that participated in the face-to-face activity first included Groups 1, 3, 5, and 7 and those who were in the virtual environment activity first included Groups 2, 4, 6, and 8. To calculate the overall frequency codes in each group researchers used the same approach as when calculating overall group frequency.In this study we investigated team leadership functions in 8 different groups consisting of 3-4 team members. We found that overall performing the team task was common in both environments. With regards to monitoring the team, in the face-to-face environment it was more common amongst the groups overall. This could be due to the lack of structure that is in a virtual team. It is on all the teammates to work together to make sure everyone is on task and moving at an appropriate speed. Virtual environments permit individuals to be monitored in various ways causing a discomfort amongst members which can be a reason why the overall group indicated more monitoring face-to-face than in the virtual environment (Overby, 2012). Solving problems was more common in the virtual environment which could be due to every team member having to pull their weight and do various tasks to ensure that all phases of problem solving, including assessment, development, and implementation of solutions are done. Future steps include analyzing individual team leadership behavior and comparing them in different collaborative team environments.