The Importance Of Leading A Virtual Team

Virtual teams are an organizational arrangement that have been growing in acceptance in the business community for a variety of reasons. One particular pressure on health care organizations is to provide high quality service under increasing price pressures (Sahni, Chigurupati, Kocher, & Cutler, 2015). As health care organizations cover a wide variety of functions, there are certain aspects of the business such as information technology and call centers that can also take advantage of time zone differences to provide high quality services that are needed for the organization in a more timely fashion, helping the organization to reach its goals more quickly (DeRosa, Hantula, Kock, & D’Arcy, 2004; Gupta, 2009; Pant & Lado, 2012; Weerakkody & …show more content…
The question then arises: can a leader be effective in leading a virtual team? As Ruggieri (2009) suggested, if a leader establishes themselves as a transactional leader, focused on the job at hand, they can be perceived by the team as being authoritative, having good self-esteem, and being focused on the job at hand. In the area of feedback recently discussed, research by Shuffler, Wiese, Salas, and Burke (2010) proposed that shared leadership can be an effective means in meeting this challenge. When shared leadership exists, there are leaders distributed across the project, and the time zones, allowing more questions and challenges to be answered as close as possible to real time which helps the project to keep on …show more content…
By establishing virtual teams, some of the costs may be contained. Work between teams in such virtual environments, requires special leadership skills for success. The need for team cohesiveness and communication has been presented. Because human communication occurs in face-to-face situations, and many communication elements occur non-verbally, it is important for the team leader to provide opportunities for key team members to meet in environments where there is a visual element. This can help build a spirit of trust and communication that will permeate the project. By building a strong sense of collaboration in the team, an effective leader can build an environment where team members are not only working together on a project but they view each other as a trusted resource. As this review has shown, when team leaders manage virtual teams taking into consideration the unique nature of such teams by ensuring the needs of the team are met, they will be able to run highly effective virtual teams that will meet the needs of the