Far but close: how leaders can strengthen social identification with virtual teams

ABSTRACTAs modern work is increasingly characterised by virtual collaboration, leaders have to coordinate teams across multiple work sites. One way to align dispersed team members towards collective goals is to strengthen their identification with the team. However, little is known about how to strengthen identification in virtual teams that do not share a physical environment. We conducted interviews based on the critical incident technique with 26 virtual leaders and 20 virtual team members. Qualitative content analysis revealed six categories of leader behaviour: 1) define the team, 2) strengthen team interdependence, 3) emphasise the team as a whole, 4) empower the team, 5) recognise team effort, and 6) stimulate informal team exchange. By mapping previous research and our findings onto a tridimensional model of social identification, we highlight both, behaviour similar to face-to-face leader behaviour and behaviour unique to the virtual context, and provide concrete behaviours for leadership practice and intervention studies.KEYWORDS: Social identificationsocial identityvirtual teamsleader behaviourvirtual leadershiponline collaboration Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Note that our article focuses on team members’ social identification with their team – conceptualized according to the social identity perspective (Ashforth and Mael Citation1989). Using the term ‘social identity’, we refer to the individual’s social identity (i.e., their self-definition in terms of being a member of a team) and not to a collective-level concept like the organization’s or team’s identity (e.g., in the sense of Whetten and Mackey Citation2002, an organization’s or team’s self-definition in terms of central, distinctive, and more or less enduring qualities).2 As the interviews were part of a larger data collection effort, the interviews were concluded with a set of questions not relevant for the topic of this manuscript. The complete interview guide including these questions can be found in the online supplemental material.3 We use the frequencies of mentions per category as an organizing principle for the presentation of our results. This shall not imply a rank order with regard to the importance of the categories, as our qualitative data does not provide such information.