Leadership in a virtual work environment : A case study of managers perception of transition to virtual leadership

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Leadership in a

virtual work

environment

A case study of managers perception of transition to virtual leadership

BACHELOR

THESIS WITHIN: Business Administration NUMBER OF CREDITS: 15 ECTS

PROGRAMME OF STUDY: International Management AUTHOR: Benjamin Khochaba, Robin Etaix & Felix Bernhardsson TUTOR: Gershon Kumeto

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the interview participants that took their time to contribute to this thesis.

Moreover, we want to thank our tutor Gershon Kumeto who has provided us with constructive criticism and relevant feedback through the entire thesis process.

In addition, we would like to express our genuine gratitude towards professors, teachers, and everybody involved at Jönköping International Business School that has been contributory to our education.

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Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration

Title: Leadership in a virtual work environment

Authors: Felix Bernhardsson, Benjamin Khochaba and Robin Etaix

Tutor: Gershon Kumeto

Date: 2021-05-20

Key terms: Virtual leadership, managers perspective, single-case study

Abstract

Technological development has made it possible to perform virtual work, and the use of virtual work increased in a stunning pace as the world was hit by the COVID-19

pandemic.

We have conducted a single-case study with an inductive design where eight managers in a distribution center delivered valuable insights and their perceptions of the sudden transition to a virtual work environment.

Our findings discovered a change in work relations between leaders and followers, and further discovered a set of new challenges that managers have had to face after this sudden transition to virtual leadership.

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In the beginning of 2020, a worldwide pandemic has impacted all the continents. In Europe, every country reacted differently to this crisis using restrictions going from suggestion of wearing protection, such as mask, to curfews or even lock down. This pandemic has caused many lives for more than a year now and showed us how unprepared our health care system was. We quickly saw shortage of equipment’s and lack of beds for patients. To give some numbers, the United States of America had other 200,000 new daily cases according to The New York Times

Despite the ecological debate that arise from the crisis, the pandemic has changed people’s works life. Indeed, government restrictions around the world and impacted mostly service-based company. In Sweden, although they did not force any restrictions, other European countries did and as a result suffered economically with a decrease of 2.9% of their GPD according to the financial report of the Ministry of Finance published December 2020. In addition, a wide deterioration in the Swedish labour market in the spring increased the unemployment rate which is expected to be around 9.0% this year. However, the recent development of a vaccine gives hope to an end. Meanwhile, companies had to adapt to such restrictions quickly using technology to continue their businesses.

Working from home is not a new concept, for years now many people have been able to work from home with the development of technology. The development of social media increased artist visibility and we have now tattoo, paint artist that works on command thanks to some website and use Instagram as a showcase (Xin Kang et al., 2019). In addition, non-independent jobs have been possible thanks to technology such as website developer who can work with companies through website like Fever.

Moreover, what makes the concept of virtual way of working are the globalization and technological developments. Groups who work together at the workplace have the possibility to work globally thanks to the virtual way of working and through virtual groups instead.

Organizations today are not as they used to be. The technology and the dynamics of the organizations have increased and the adaptivity of organizations has also increased. The world is changing at high speed and the flexibility of organizations to shift workplaces has become easier. People can work from all over the world together and reach one

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another thanks to this technology. Hence, this is what makes it possible to keep working in a virtual environment. The terms virtual and distant leadership all appeared thanks to this technology. Although some may say that there are conflicts created because of this technology, like the social process, some say that it is an effective way to keep the leadership working in a better way (Alvesson et al., 2017).

Further, the globalization of companies has created a semi-virtual environment. A study in 2008 showed that for companies with over 10,000 employees, 80% of them have been or are in a virtual team (Schmidt, 2014). Multinational companies usually have a center of operations where the manager is located and where the strategy is discussed and applied. They work with virtual settings to keep the flow of information going and coming back. For example, a financial director of operation must manage a certain number of factories while working with the operational manager. This would be impossible without the technology. In a sense, a lot of jobs are nowadays ‘virtual jobs’ or ‘remote jobs’. Therefore, companies were able to react quickly to the pandemic crisis and went to remote settings to virtual settings. These new virtual settings create a new environment for leaders, called virtual teams and therefore these leaders can be defined as virtual leaders. Therefore, we will, in this thesis, study leaders in virtual teams and explore their behavior to find which leadership style is suitable to the said environment.

1.2 Problem discussion

We already know that a leader in virtual settings faces many challenges that a leader in normal setting would not. For instance, a virtual team leader has more limited contact with its team since you must eliminate all the coffee or corridor talk, the access to information is restricted and requires a personal effort from the leader. In addition, communication in virtual settings is voiced based and we lose the other communication indicator such as non-verbal cues or tone of voice (Schmidt, 2014).

In virtual settings, a leader, while communicating with his subordinates, receive less information as said before, it would be interesting to investigate how a leader proceed to motivate his subordinates to achieve a common goal in these particular circumstances. In addition, there is a literature gap of quantitative or qualitative research on virtual leaders which does not allow us to draw trustworthy conclusions on what for example type of skills a virtual leader requires or how he should behave in such environment. Therefore, the transition of the workplace and the affection on the leadership style will be investigated.

There is a lot of research and theory about leadership and leadership styles but few studies about leadership in a virtual environment, since it was only viewed as an option before and became now an obligation. We know about leadership styles, the characteristics of

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them, and how they are practiced in a co-located work environment. However, we do not know about how they are practiced in a virtual work environment, if they are feasible, or if there appear different challenges in that particular environment. Therefore, we believe that it is important to investigate the gap in the literature to get an understanding of how managers perceive the transition to virtual leadership.

1.3 Purpose

In order to fill the literature, gap in virtual leadership, the purpose of this thesis is to build valuable theory in virtual leadership. We are therefore aiming at explaining what challenges a virtual leader can face in contrast to a manager in a traditional co-located work environment. We will investigate how managers handle their leadership after a sudden transition to virtual leadership. We further intend to contribute with primary data to investigate what managers experience from their perspective regarding virtual leadership and the challenges that come with it. Furthermore, we want to explore how they believe it has impacted their relationships with employees, in contrast to the current literature on leadership styles, which is mostly theoretical. The managers in our study work in virtual teams. Hence, the term virtual teams will be explained in chapter 2.

1.4 Research questions

Research question 1: Does a leader change his leadership style when transitioning from normal settings to virtual settings?

Research question 2: What challenges does a leader faces in virtual environment compare to in normal environment?

Research question 3: What are the changes in the relationship between leaders-followers in virtual settings from a leader point of view?

1.5 Delimitations

People can be complex and, depending on their culture/ background, they can favor a certain leadership style or a certain work environment. Also, we understand that every country in the world did not experience the same circumstances due to Covid-19. Therefore, we will focus our qualitative and quantitative studies in Sweden. According to Jonhson, J. (2021) ‘home office in Sweden was established well before Covid-19' and the numbers published by Statista in 2021 corroborate. Indeed, the number of companies

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with home office option has increase by 20% between 2017 and 2019. Therefore, we think that, by restricting our research to Sweden, we can study leadership in virtual teams as a long-term solution for Swedish company. The limits remain that the lack of studies about the efficiency of a company with virtual settings will not allow us to have a clear answer on which leadership style allows a better team performance regarding the settings of that said team.

Finally, since the Covid-19 situation is a recent event, we only found one study on the COVID-19 impact on leadership (Bartsch et al., 2020) regarding the management of service-based companies. Most of the others references we could find mostly talk about leadership theories and leadership in virtual teams' theories. Therefore, we will focus our research on this aspect to fill this gap with qualitative data to get insights of how managers have experienced the situation.

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2. Literature review

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This chapter aims to provide the reader with a definition of leadership, theory on different leadership styles as well as theory on leaders and followers. The framework of leadership styles is used as a basis to get insights of what type of leadership the managers in our study perform. __________________________________________________________________

2.1 Literature Collection

Since virtual leadership is a relatively new concept and is possible thanks to technological development, research dating from 20 years have been avoided. Recent research, 15 to 1 year ago, allowed us to gain an understanding of the concept. Having a deep understanding of leadership is crucial to our subject, we started our research on the data base JU Primo and Google with the following key words “leadership”, “leadership styles”, “followers”, “virtual leadership”. Furthermore, we searched for combination and variation of these key words such as “leader versus followers” or “e-leadership” in order to find adequate literature. We also search other thesis related to our subject to find useful literatures. We proceeded to do literature reviews of each academic article found where we analysed and wrote: introduction, methodology, result and discussion. That method allowed us to find the most relevant literature to our topic and divide them in three parts: leadership, virtual teams and finally theory. The literature review also allowed us to identify the most referenced articles and therefore, there trustworthiness. We will use the most quoted references as our main through the thesis.

2.2 Leadership

Outside of family and friends, a leader is the most influential person in people's lives according to Eikenberry and Turmel (2018). What this means for the leader is a significant amount of responsibility. Therefore, the role of a leader must be considered, and the way leadership is conducted is vital. Bolden (2004) also means that leadership is considered as the significant discussion in different businesses and organizations. This is because it is included in most fields according to Eikenberry et. al (2018). Therefore, the importance of the leadership topic cannot be avoided. A lack of successful leadership skill is according to Watson (2017) defined as “majority of organizations claim that a lack of leadership skills does affect the ability towards goal- achievement”. Hence, leadership is vital and even in times like this, during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders need to be

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present, even virtually if required, to keep the workers or followers motivated and informed.

According to Bolden (2004) there is no “widely accepted definition of leadership” and neither an optimal way to develop a leader or leadership skills. This is because when you are a leader, you are working with people, and people are different. People can also be complex. If there are no followers, there are no leaders. A leader only exists when there are people as followers. Daft and Marcic (2017) however states that the definition of leadership is the ability to influence people toward the attainment of goals.

Another distinction that is important when discussing the area of leadership is the distinction between management and leadership. The definition of management according to Daft & Marcic (2017) is “the attainment of organizational goals in an effective and efficient manner through planning, organizing, leading and controlling organizational resources”. What distinguish these two concepts are the direction of control and rights (management) and the direction of values, meaning and inspiration (leadership). A manager will be task-oriented while a leader must be task-oriented and relation-oriented (Bartsch et al., 2020). Therefore, every leader is a manager, but every manager is not a leader.

2.3 Leaders and followers

The first concept that gave light to leadership was tales about heroic and demonic figures, showing a hero followed by all because of his strength, courage or other natural aptitude. We tell stories through the Hero accomplishment forgetting about the people who followed him to complete his quest. For instance, Napoleon is remembered for all his victories, but nobody knows any soldier name.

We then described leaders as action-oriented that would lead followers/subordinates who would passively and obediently follow (Baker, 2007). A definition coming from the Great Man theory stating that a leadership talents and skills were assumed to be acquired from birth and could not be imitated by others.

Even in recent history events, we see the same figures. World War II emphasized the leader role with figures like Churchill and De Gaulle and United States have been since then working with vertical organization promoting leaders with the American Dream while followers were diminished and qualified as “sheep”, “passive”, “obedient” or even “lemming” (Baker, 2007, p.52).

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While studies in the 1980 theorized different leadership styles and discredited the Great Man theory, the role of active follower was brought to light according to Susan Baker (2007), by Hollander & Offerman in 1990 stating that qualities associated with leadership and followership were interdependent. Meaning that the followership qualities must be considered by the leader to achieve good leadership.

According to Alvesson (2017), researchers in leadership assume that leader and followers share the same understanding of the leadership exercise while Alvesson explained the divergence of perception between the two roles and how it affects the relationship. Indeed, Alvesson studies shows that in some cases subordinates do not see themselves as followers and their manager as a leader that he explains with a divergence in the relation. Divergence in a relationship happens when the manager and its subordinates do not have the same values and construction creating a “no leadership relation” (Figure 1). while leadership happens when these two concepts are met. Therefore, the roles of leader and follower are according to Alvesson (2017) still relevant.

To continue, leadership is “a social influencing process based on the convergence and alignment of meanings in terms of definition and assessment of a leader/follower relationship” (Alvesson, 2017, p.329). Although the role of follower is presented by Alvesson as something integrated by the subordinates, he believes a deeper study on the matter might show the concept of follower as irrelevant. The main reason being that if a subordinate takes responsibilities, he will not consider himself as a follower but as a leader.

2.4 Leadership styles

Charismatic leaders inspire and motivates followers more than the other types of leaders would normally do, which means that the charismatic leader is willing to inspire and motivate despite obstacles and personal sacrifice. The charismatic leader states an elevated vision for the followers to identify with. The leader normally displays an ability to understand and be able to emphasize with the followers. The last step is empowerment to the followers to motivate them to accomplish results.

The perfect example of a charismatic leader in the business world is the Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Other examples: Martin Luther King Jr and Alexander the Great (Daft & Marcic, 2017).

Transformational leaders are somewhat like the charismatic but are distinguished with the special ability to innovate and change the followers identified needs and concerns.

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This provides meaning and gives the followers a new “chance” to create a challenge for the followers to look at old problems, but with a different way.

Another famous example of a transformational leader is Jeff Bezos. Other examples: Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller (Daft & Marcic, 2017).

Transactional leaders clarify tasks and roles for the followers. To understand the transformational leader better, there will be a comparison of these two leadership styles. The ability of the transactional leader to satisfy and reward the follower may improve the productivity. Transactional leaders often emphasize the importance of budgets, efficiency, plans etc. They are usually more committed to the organization then the other leadership styles. This leadership style is important for organizations, but a “leading change” requires another approach. That is where the transformational leader has the advantage.

Bill Gates is an example of a transactional leader. Military leaders and NFL coaches are also examples of this leadership style (Daft & Marcic, 2017).

Warrick (1981) presents 4 additional leadership styles. The 4 different types are the Humans Relations leader, the Democratic leader, the Laissez Faire leader and the Autocratic leader. These 4 leadership styles work more as a “leadership philosophy based on the leader's assumptions about people and the role of a leader” as Warrick states it. The Human Relations leader put low emphasis on numbers, financials, performance and puts high emphasis on the people. Human Relations and Laissez Faire has the same attitude towards performance. The Human Relation type of leader believes that the people that are managed are transparent, trustworthy and self- motivated. Good harmony and a happy workplace are the key for this type of leader. This type of leader relies on teamwork and the collective (Warrick, 1981).

The Laissez Faire leader as the Human Relations leader share the same attitude towards emphasis on performance but distinguish by having a low emphasis on people as well. Which means that the leader thinks of the employees as unpredictable and does not make connection or friendship with the employees. The way of working for a leader of this specific characteristics is to just wait for any employee and hand over work to the employee (Warrick, 1981).

The Autocratic leader shares same attitude as Laissez Faire on emphasis on people but puts high emphasis on performance. Same as the other, does not trust people and believe that the employees are lazy and irresponsible. The planning, structure and decision

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making should be all the manager's job and no involvement from the employees. Authority is an important word for this type of leader, which means that this leader controls and manipulates his or her employees to achieve results (Warrick, 1981).

Democratic leader, which shares same attitude towards both the Human Relations leader when discussing people, and Autocratic leader when discussing performance. The Democratic leader is focused on a well-established organizational structure, with motivated employees to accomplish challenging goals. This type of leader seeks to fulfill the employees needs to reach personal and organizational goals (Warrick, 1981).

Daft & Marcic (2017, p. 473) presents the four leadership styles that “are in tune with today’s turbulent times” which are Level 5 leadership, servant leadership, authentic leadership and interactive leadership.

Level 5 leadership is the leadership with focus on the executive level. Which is why it is named Level 5 (to present the highest number out of 5 in the hierarchy) A key word when describing the approach is humility, which is the opposite of feeling prideful. Having a big ego will not specifically work in this type of leadership. Level 5 leaders are often seen as “shy and self- effacing" (Daft & Marcic, 2017, p. 474). The way of working for Level 5 leadership is that excellence is based on humility and dedication. When a conflict occurs or an issue, the leader in this approach takes full responsibility and on the opposite site, when something good happens the leader gives credit to others. Level 5 leaders are significantly ambitious for the corporations they work for rather than being ambitious for themselves. Qi Lu, the Vice president of Microsoft Application and service group is an example of Level 5 leadership.

Servant leadership is a leader who “transcends self- interest to serve others, the organization, and society” (Daft & Marcic, 2017, p. 474). Therefore, this type of leadership can often be found in nonprofit organizations. This gives the servant leaders an opportunity to apply the skills of leadership in possession and to serve others. An example of a servant leader is the Captain Richard Phillips (From the Captain Phillips Movie).

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Authentic leadership are the leaders with the ability of staying transparent. An authentic leader is a leader who is well known about their personal beliefs and values. From own belief, the leader can make the decisions. By this way, the followers will know what the leader stands for and this inspires trust. The authentic leader helps the team to develop and grow and respect the different points of view that the team may have. Main characteristics of the authentic leader is passion with purpose. When a leader inspires the followers with passion and commitment to a purpose, they followers will themselves be inspired by the commitment. Authentic leaders lead with not only the head, but also the heart. Which means that they include compassion for others when making decisions. An example of an authentic leader is Vernon Clark, who served as US Chief of Naval Operations (Daft & Marcic, 2017).

Interactive leadership known to be the “female type of leading” where “leader favors a consensual and collaborative process” (Daft & Marcic, 2017, p. 477). Both men and women can practice this specific type of leadership, and the key characteristics is that this type of leader focuses more on the relation with the workers than the position power. Cindy Szadokioerski, Vice president of O’Hare airport is an example of this type of leadership.

Self- leadership according to Neck (2006, p. 271) a process of which individuals achieves ”self-direction and self-motivation necessary to perform”. Self-leadership strategies are most commonly divided into three categories which are: behavior- focused strategies, natural-reward strategies and constructive thought pattern strategies. Behavior focused strategies aims to increase a person's self-awareness in order to facilitate behavioral management. Behavior-focused strategies include ”self-observations, self- goal setting, self- reward and self- punishment. Self-observations raises the ”why” and ”how” one engages in specific behaviors Neck (2006, p. 271).

Full- range leadership theory is according to Kääröäinen & Kyngäs (2009, p. 775) the ”most widely used comprehensive theory of leadership that encompasses a range of leader behaviors”. The range of leader behavior it includes are transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and laissez- faire leadership.

Shared leadership according to D’Innocenzo, Mathieu & Kukenberger (2016, p. 1965) shared leadership is different from ”traditional leadership theories”. While traditional leadership focuses on the ”leaders downward influence on their followers through formal

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authority and power”, shared leadership includes the hierarchical, individualized and undirectional theories. Shared leadership is often connected to the relationship it has with team performance.

2.5 Technology in virtual teams

In virtual teams, a communication platform is needed. Zigurs (2002) highlights the importance of choosing a virtual work platform that has relevant specifications for the task in order for the virtual team to complete it as efficient as possible. This means that the most expensive mediums are not always the most efficient for your specific task, but it also must flow well with the context of the task, the technological knowledge from the individuals in the virtual team and likewise.

Since it’s nearly impossible to predict in what direction technology will be evolved and how fast it will go, it can be interesting to learn from previous experiences in this area. Zigurs (2002) mentions earlier technological development in history, and if the future follows that trend, the technological development will occur much faster than we count on. Moreover, new technology in history tended to be used incorrectly or took time to implement in workplaces due to restricted access and lack of knowledge in how to use the software. In terms of virtual leadership, Zigurs means that technological development will be crucial for further developing virtual leadership. Interfaces have potential of becoming more life-like, which gives virtual a chance to become more equivalent to reality.

2.6 Leadership in virtual teams

There is little research on virtual leadership in contrast to traditional leadership. However, Zigurs (2002) states that in a virtual environment it is more difficult to build trust, harder to express influence, and self-leadership is an important aspect of working virtual. Traditional definitions of leadership often rely on attributes such as different behaviors and what type of power of influence a leader has. Instead of focusing on the previously mentioned attributes, virtual leadership rather puts emphasis on full-range leadership. In a full-range leadership, the leader strives for process of followers, development and getting the team to grow and thrive. Zigurs suggests that full-range leadership is suitable as distance leadership for virtual teams, and the reason for this circumstance is that virtual teams heavily rely on autonomy instead of direct control.

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The transition from traditional leadership to virtual leadership should be seen as an opportunity and not an oxymoron (Zigurs, 2002). Zigurs states that virtual leadership provides opportunities to take on the role of leadership in many ways. For instance, transformational leadership, shared leadership and self-leadership all have an opportunity of being performed in a virtual environment.

When a firm experiences a crisis of any sort, the behavior of leaders will be crucial to maintain performance and motivation among employees in the company (Bartsch, Weber, Büttgen and Huber, 2020). Bartsch et al. (2020) further underlines the importance of managers balancing a combination of managing leadership behavior (MLB) and enabling leadership behavior (ELB) during uncertain times. Hence, leadership needs to be pursued by clearly stating in which direction the work is aiming, in order to improve the teamwork in a virtual team. To give the virtual team the opportunity of performing at their highest level, a leader must provide them with support and autonomy. This gives the individuals in a virtual team a better possibility to adapt to crisis situations, for instance COVID-19 (Bartsch et al., 2020).

2.7 Virtual teams

Virtual teams are a broad term that can be experienced in multiple forms. Zigurs (2002) defines virtual teams as “a collection of individuals who are geographically and/or organizationally or otherwise dispersed and who collaborate via communication and information technologies in order to accomplish a specific goal”. It consists of two or more people cooperating in one or more ways other than traditional face-to-face cooperation. The term virtual is more fulfilled if a team is dispersed in as many ways as possible (Zigurs, 2002). Zigurs further displays the four most common dispersions in which a traditional team transforms to virtual. Zigurs introduces four dimensions which are organizational dispersion, geographic dispersion, temporal dispersion and cultural dispersion. However, she underlines that many other dimensions than the four she presents can be experienced (Figure 2).

When virtual teams engage in online meetings, studies have shown that the team members tend to focus heavily on their individual tasks rather than developing their relations with the rest of the team (Zigurs, 2002).

Greenberg, Greenberg and Antonucci (2007) states in the journal that trust can only be built by the course of time and that could be difficult to require since virtual teams could be quick- assembled, with unplanned co- workers.

3. Methodology

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This chapter of the thesis presents the research design of the study and describes the different processes of data collection so the reader can obtain a deeper understanding of how and why this particular process has been applied.

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3.1 Research philosophy

Research philosophy represents the author's beliefs about the way data should be collected, analysed and used. These beliefs come in the form of paradigms, defined as “a set of interrelated assumptions about the social world which provides a philosophical and conceptual framework for the systematic study of that world” (Kuhn, 1970, p.10). There are three major research paradigms: positivism, interpretivism and critical theory (Johanson, G. & Williamson, G., 2018).

To begin with, positivism paradigm represents a scientific approach, such as positivist researchers consider that knowledge is based on the observable and experienceable also called empiricism. It usually imposes testing or various hypotheses resulting in a binary response (true or false). The positivist philosophy is usually used for quantitative research, therefore does not provide a way to achieve our purpose

To continue, interpretivism paradigm represents the researchers who believe human beings are involved in interpreting their ever-changing. Therefore, believe that the social world is built by people. The main challenge of an interpretivist is to understand and deal with the multiple realities of the participants. We can describe this challenge with an onion, each layer of the onion provides a different perspective of reality and cannot be considered as more true than another (Guba and Lincoln, 1981). We are aware that there can be difficulties in understanding the perspective of the participants that are very different from us in terms of values and cultural background. However, Sutton (1993) suggests that one can only understand something through the body of the person who experienced that something. Implying that being aware that as a researcher we will not be able to ‘live’ that experience, it strengthens our point of view.

Furthermore, Johanson, G. & Williamson, G. (2018) explain that interpretivist can be defined by two paradigms called constructivism and phenomenology. Constructivism focus on investigating meanings about broad concept while phenomenology focus on the human experience and the various perspective a certain phenomenon can be interpreted.

Finally, Critical theory shares the same foundation of interpretivism, that the social world is built by the people. However, there is on key difference: “critical theory is concerned in particular with issues of power and justice and the ways that the economy, matters of race, class, and gender […] interact to construct a social system” (Johanson, G. & Williamson, G., 2018)

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As researchers we find the interpretivism approach the most intelligent choice since we are planning to understand how managers experienced remote leadership. We will then use an interpretivism, phenomenology philosophy for this research.

3.2 Research Design

A qualitative research methodology is associated with the research of meanings, it involves the study of preferences using human senses and interpretation of them to draw findings.

Furthermore, qualitative research approach allows a deeper understanding of behaviours under various condition. Therefore, the use of a qualitative research approach is coherent with our purpose.

To continue, a case study is a process of research into the development of a person, group, or a situation. The case study approach allows a deep understanding of a situation with multiple participants. All participants are facing the same conditions and therefore allows a different perspective from the participants. We know that this company has used virtual work, therefore will provide participants facing the situation we want to research. Furthermore, we will conduct interviews with managers with a specific survey. We used an explanatory survey as it aims to explore interrelationships of variables and tend to create link between them (Johanson, G. & Williamson, G., 2018). Also, we have designed the questionnaire to be broad about the topic we are researching and will adapt it accordingly to the data collected.

We are conducting an inductive single-case study to build theory and to be able to draw conclusions on the qualitative data collected in the interview process.

3.3 Data Collection

We decided to focus on a company that desire to remain nameless. The case company is a large furniture company that operates with their distribution centre in Jönköping. We know that this company switched to a virtual work environment for the time of the pandemic. Therefore, present the conditions we want to study. We created the sample of research through two methods, the hoc method, and the snowball method. The Ad-hoc method consist in using the tools accessible to you in the instance, the ease of access. The snowball method consists of finding one participant and ask him to recommend other participants for the study, like a snowball would do falling down the mountain. Covid-19 restriction in Sweden does not allow much freedom in terms of gathering. Therefore, we

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thought intelligent to use this method to obtain more participants. As stated before, the use of focus group is highly time consuming to organise and hard due to the Covid-19 restriction. For the same reasons, observation is not a suitable data collection.

3.4 Interview process

In order to perform our research, we designed our interview questions to be open with the purpose of allowing us to ask follow-up questions to the interviewee in order to derive the most useful data possible.

As planned, the interview questions created a good template for us to proceed with follow-up questions and the interviews kept going with a good flow of conversation. To provide an accurate perception of the interviews and the interviewee’s, Table 1 is prepared to present information on work title, interview date, interview length, and interview method. The latter was something we aimed to perform by visiting the company and interviewing the managers on spot but due to COVID-19 restrictions at the company, all of the interviews were conducted through recorded meetings on Microsoft Teams. Furthermore, the recordings allowed us to focus solely on the interviews that we could later transcribe, instead of taking notes simultaneously. Since only two of our three group members are native Swedish speakers, we conducted the interviews in English even though the interviewees were all native Swedish speakers. The reason for this particular circumstance was to get everyone involved in the interview process, and it was mentioned in the beginning of every interview that the interviewees were allowed to complete sentences in Swedish if any language-related barriers would appear for them when answering our questions.

3.5 Data analysis

The constructivist grounded theory is a method of collection and analysis of qualitative data, it is mainly use for developing theory. It can be used to test existing theory or create theory. Constructivist grounded theory (Herring, J., 2011) differentiate itself from classical grounded theory concerning the development of theory. Classical grounded theorist build theory directly from the data gathered while constructivist grounded theorist view theory as build by the researcher interpretation (Johanson, G. & Williamson, G., 2018). Since the purpose of our research is to build valuable theory for virtual leadership, this method is in accordance with our goal and research philosophy. The constructivist grounded theory has 5 steps.

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After comes the coding part, the purpose of coding is to code, using sentences, the action, opinion, attitude of the research participants. It is the first step to interpretation of the means expressed in interviews. Coding is a very important process in constructivist grounded theory since it is the first step to analyzing the data and is at the base of our interpretation.

The following step is Themes, roughly similar to coding, The researcher will go through the initial data and the codes to create theoretical codes, called themes. Themes are based “on abstract concepts rather than empirical statements made by participants” (Johanson, G. & Williamson, G., 2018, p-232).

Developing categories is a crucial step in data analysis. Using the constructivist grounded theory, categories are created mainly by repetitive themes. The researcher role is to search for patterns in the themes and try to group these patterns into different categories. This step will help the researcher to build theory.

The end point of the constructivist grounded theory is theory development. First of all, theory is explained by Birks and Mills (2011, p-112) as “an explanatory theme comprising of a set of concepts related to each other through logical patterns of connectivity”. According to this definition the previous work achieved allow us to build our theory thanks to the categories and the themes analysed. By finding connection between categories, we can therefore develop our theory.

3.6 Research quality

Since nearly every journal we used have been peer reviewed, books have been used, and qualitative interviews have been conducted, we state that the sources of the data in our study are trustworthy. Therefore, the internal validity is good. On the other hand, we can’t guarantee that our findings and conclusions are applicable to every firm or every business model, which means that the external validity is questionable to some extent.

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First, we have to understand the difference between moral, ethics and law. Moral represents what we consider as individuals right or wrong, it may vary depending on age, cultural group, ethnic background, religion, life experiences, education and gender. Ethics represent standards or codes of behaviour expected of an individual by a group. Different set of ethical codes that have been socially accepted by all that will be discussed after. Concerning law, it represents a system of rule that can or cannot do.

Ethical considerations present self-reflection on different types of ethical codes and how we are planning to solve them. It represents the capacity of the researcher to understand the responsibility of his research. The development of new technology (computers, internet, etc...) created an easier and permanent access to the research, therefore the importance of ethical considerations has grown in the past 30 years.

During our study we will be directly in contact with individuals and have access to private information, we ask them to fill a consent form asking if we can use their name, profession, age and company. Since most of participants asked us to not name the company or their names, we decided to not mentioned the name of the company in the research and to name participants with the following code: P1, P2, P3... Pn. This solution allows us to respect the privacy of others and won’t impact the findings in any way. In addition, this method avoids any harm that our study could have created. From our understanding our research could have harmed in two ways. The first one by sharing the company’s personal information on their organization and way of working. The second one, sharing working habits of certain participants that could have impacted their career or perception from others. Again, the solution of having nameless participants solves this issue.

Furthermore, we did not force any participants to do the interview. We emailed them to explain the topic of our research and to find a possible video meeting. In addition, we transcribed the interview using a website and also manually to make sure every word pronounce by the participant is correctly transcribed and not modified.

3.8 Profile of case company

The case company is a large furniture company that operates with their distribution center in Jönköping. The company itself operates worldwide and aims to distribute furniture to both companies and families. However, we’ve chosen to narrow it down and conduct research within their business in the distribution center in Jönköping. The company provided intel from several of the different departments within the organization at their distribution center. The distribution center possesses most departments within the typical organization, only the finance department was excluded from this research, and that is

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4. Findings

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In this chapter, the reader is provided with data presentation which in this thesis is introduced by presenting themes per respondent. The most common themes derived from coding the interviews each represent a topic in the findings.

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4.1 Interview data presentation

After coding the interviews, we derived the themes and will present data per respondent divided into themes; Managing a unit, Vision of leadership, Theoretical perspective of teams, everyone in a team is different, Benefits of transition to virtual leadership,

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Negative impacts of transition to virtual leadership, and New challenges that appeared with virtual leadership.

4.1.1 P1 Operational Support Team Leader

Managing a unit

The first interviewee is experienced and has had 18 years of experience in the firm. Furthermore, this participant is a team leader for the gatehouse and is currently managing 12 people on a daily basis.

Vision of leadership

His vision of leadership is that you have to develop the team as persons and as co-workers and to make the team grow as a group. Moreover, this participant believes that leadership is about giving the people in the group the encouragement to take responsibility in a group and make decisions which can further make them grow as individuals by doing so.

Theoretical perspective of teams

The first participant believes that there are leaders and there are followers in a group of people. He believes that it is a natural habit to either take on a leadership role or an anonymous follower role where you want to be guided in your work. He further believes that the natural leaders in a group can make important decisions when he’s not around. However, he states that a skilled leader can turn followers into leaders by finding their potentials and believing in them.

Everyone in a team is different

Even if people can be managed and led in different directions, the interviewee believes that everyone in a team is different and that it might not always be a good idea to turn people into leaders.

Benefits of transition to virtual leadership

In some instances, the first respondent tells us that the virtual work has been efficient when it has replaced co-located work. For instance, they used to have meetings that were a 2-hour car ride away from their office that now has been replaced by virtual meetings. The interviewee states that it has saved the team both time and money, and it has a less negative impact on the environment.

Negative impacts of transition to virtual leadership

Our first interviewee pointed out several events during virtual work that has had a negative impact. Since restrictions have caused the team to not be able to meet each other

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every day, this participant is experiencing a lack of closeness and also lack of engagement since he believes that it’s hard to feel the same engagement during virtual work. When his team works from home in Microsoft Teams, they use webcams. However, the participant still feels that this is worse than working co-located since it’s hard to interpret body language and moreover interpret the well-being of his team members. After the sudden transition to virtual work, they have had some new hires in the team and the interviewee has not had the opportunity to meet them in person yet due to the restrictions and virtual work which he believes is negative. Furthermore, the manager finds it difficult that it’s hard to know how your employees feel when working from home since it’s harder to come close to them and see how they feel and how their well-being is.

New challenges that appeared with virtual leadership

A challenging new aspect in virtual leadership that he experiences is the challenge of trusting your employees. In a virtual environment it is much easier to hide behind the screen or turn off the webcam. The managers have no idea of what the employees are doing from home besides the work they put in. He has not changed his leadership style when working virtual but tries to remain the same leader, only that he has to adapt to some new virtual tools now.

4.1.2 P2 Operational Support Manager

Managing a unit

The second participant is mainly responsible of white collars in the workplace so the positions under him are mainly administrative. On a daily basis, he is the manager of 8 employees.

In his opinion, leadership is built of many components to be both a boss and a role model as a leader. Furthermore, he believes that a leader should be a generalist and not a specialist. The specialist role is therefore delegated to employees with specific knowledge in certain areas. The generalist is therefore there to get the group together and guide them towards the right direction.

The interviewee believes in the theory of leaders and followers. For instance, he thinks that some people like to be directed and just do their job whereas others prefer to take on a leader role and step forward in the group.

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When building a team as a leader and role model, he underlines that everyone in a group is different and everyone has had different experiences and come from different cultures before joining this particular group. Hence, it is his role to build a team with these different components.

A lot of their meetings that used to be co-located or even located in different countries or cities are now held remotely. This has led to higher efficiency during the meetings, time and money has been saved through skipped car-rides to meetings. The small talk during meetings tends to be skipped virtual which he believes is a leading factor towards the higher efficiency.

On the transition to virtual work, our respondent says that the new environment to work in has had some negative impact. For instance, he does not get to see everyone each day and also feels a loss of body language while working virtual through Microsoft Teams. Internet is not always 100% stable for everyone in the team when they all rely on their home networks which can cause disruptions. Not everyone has their webcam on at all occasions so it makes it harder to feel that you’re communicating for real and body language is again underlined as something that is clearly missed out.

A challenge he mentions is that it’s harder to get everyone involved. In a room where everyone is seeing each other, it’s easier. But through Microsoft Teams and especially without webcams it’s easier for employees to hide and choose to be excluded from parts of the work. He also states that it’s harder to feel the closeness to employees by simple small talk and going to them when everyone is working co-located. Now you have to write to them specifically or even call them to recreate that feeling.

4.1.3 P3 Central Fulfilment Unit Manager

Managing a unit

The third respondent is responsible for the working environment, the people working within that unit, the processes connected to that unit, the budget, and the business development of that unit. This respondent is managing a unit of 19 leaders on a daily basis which in their turn manage 150 people.

Leadership is trust. Build expectations of the employees and subordinates. It is also about developing the employees from the position that they are. Leadership for P3 is also about understanding and respect each other.

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P3 believes in the concept of leaders and followers. But P3 at the same time believes that there exists a leader in some of those who think that they will never actually lead, they just need encouragement.

Motivating a person who does not want to be motivated is one of the main challenge a leader might face, P3 states. To be able to deal with human beings every day is a difficult thing to do, in line with doing personal tasks.

The cost impact is one of the components P3 mentions is a huge success. Other successful factors are the minimized effect on the environment. Transportation between units and cities has significantly decreased. Reduced hours in transportation ends up in higher efficiency.

On the transition to virtual work, our respondent says that the new environment to work in has had some negative impact. Closeness is one of the things P3 mentions has decreased since the outbreak of the pandemic. The small talk in between work tasks has significantly decreased, and this effects the work relationships P3 mentions.

More difficult to speak without being interrupted, more difficult to brainstorm and more difficult to conduct a successful brainstorming session.

The respondent finds it harder to get close to your subordinates, harder to create and maintain successful trustful working relationships.

4.1.4 P4 Warehouse Manager

Managing a unit

P4 is responsible for over 10 team leaders and approximately 10 subordinates per team leader as well.

Leadership to P4 is not about telling anyone what to do, but more how they should do. P4 thinks that the development of P4 leadership is through the subordinates. P4 lets the subordinates take responsibility so that they can develop and motivate themselves.

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P4 believes in the concept of leaders and followers. Not everyone wants to lead, some will only follow, according to P4. P4 thinks it is because leadership comes with responsibility and not everyone wants to take responsibility.

Motivating a person who does not want to be motivated is one of the main challenge a leader might face. Satisfying everyone is also something that is very difficult to do as a leader. Trying to please everyone P4 says was one of the mistakes in the career P4 had.

Again, the transportation decrease is mentioned. Fewer hours transporting, more hours to work, more hours of efficient working. Also, easier to get in touch with people far away.

Body language is one of the things P4 says is missing. You do not know if the person you are talking to are actually listening, understanding and how the person is feeling. A physical meeting would have been clearer and more direct than virtual communication P4 adds. The communication is inhumane through cameras and screens; therefore, people have a harder time voicing their values through technology P4 believes.

Harder to get close to your subordinates, harder to create and maintain successful trustful working relationship. Harder to voice your values, harder to remember that it is not a robot you are talking to, but a human being across the screen.

4.1.5 P5 Warehouse Manager

Managing a unit

Participant 5 is one of the three warehouse managers and manage a unit of 9 team leaders each responsible of 20 employees. The interviewee has 2 years and a half of experience in the firm as a manager.

Leadership is about building relationship, by listening and coaching. The interviewee explains that a leader has to build trust with his team by giving responsibilities. Another notion of leadership discussed by the participants is adaptability: to be able to adapt according to the needs of the one you lead. He called it “Situational Leadership”.

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The notion of follower is according to the participant, a choice made by a person. He believes that leading is accessible to a lot of people and is more a personal decision from the person rather than having one leader and everybody follows.

People have different personalities and to lead in one way or another might impact the responsiveness of the person in the team. Therefore, it is a leader role to adapt to these personalities and adopt the right leadership for each.

Sometimes virtual environment can be more time effective. The participant explains that thanks to virtual tools they can have a meeting with 25% of the leaders at the same time and break into smaller groups if needed for seminar per example. According to P5, such meetings will stay on virtual tools after the pandemic because it is more effective and money saving. Some employees appreciate to spend more time with their family at home and still have some day the office.

The virtual environment has deleted the morning coffee talk or the corridor talk. Communication is exclusively about work. Virtual leadership requires planification according to P5, spontaneous meetings are not possible due to time availability. It becomes time consuming for the leader to receive information, body language during calls is lost, casual communication is hard to find time for and it is hard to have deeper conversations with your employees according to the interviewee.

The participant said that a leader challenge is consistently keep motivated and challenged your team and added that in a virtual environment it is harder to motivate due to lack of physical communication. However, by being a good listener and with the past trustworthy relationship, it is still manageable. Another challenge is to adapt to the new communication systems, in virtual meetings it is easier to not participate and it is your role to make sure everyone is involved and acknowledge. Time managing is the biggest challenge of virtual leadership according to P5, make time to spend some casual talking with co-workers is essential to maintain the relationship.

4.1.6 P6 Human Resources Manager

Managing a unit

The sixth participant is worked as a human resources manager in his debut in the firm and is now in the position of human resources project leader where he works on projects with an HR perspective and manage 5 persons daily.

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P6 describes leadership as guiding and motivating people. Leadership is about giving the guidelines and be here when someone is struggling. Furthermore, transparency, trust, in a team is essential to navigate your subordinates.

Followers and leaders a two different thing and not everybody are a leader according to the interviewee. Some might enjoy responsibility to be challenged and other might be resistant to these challenges.

To continue, he thinks that people are different and depending on their personality some might enjoy being a leader, some might enjoy following.

According to P6, a virtual environment has some perks. To begin with it is easier to connect with colleagues around the globe, also meetings with a large number of participants don’t require traveling, hotel, etc… making it less time consuming and costing less. To continue, working in a virtual environment open windows in terms of hiring, in order to find the most qualified employee for the job you have the whole world to choose from.

The loss of the body language makes it harder to make things understood according to the interviewee. The body language lose does not allow to have deeper conversations and therefore makes it harder to understand a person’s habits and feelings. As the interviewee said “it’s easier to have misunderstandings”. In addition, the communication system creates a lack of closeness that can impact moral and engagement.

One of the challenges mentioned by the participant is to be available, since you don’t have the work place to check on your subordinates, virtual leader must be available and present for their employees when needed. Also, the participant added that virtual leadership requires meetings “one to one” to understand your employees in term of moral, motivation and engagement.

4.1.7 P7 Business Navigation Manager

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P7 is working in the logistic unit as business navigator manager. The participant has a support position for other units and therefore manage about 150 people daily. He has been working for the company for 4 years and has 1 year experience in managing people.

The participant explains that an important factor of leadership is trust. One way to achieve it is to empower employees by making them take decisions on their own according to the interviewee.

When asked about the roles of leaders and followers, the interviewee answered that everybody can be a leader if they have the desire to do become one. However, some people are happier doing what they are told and can be considered followers.

The interviewee expressed that a team is composed of complex people that all need special dedication to build relationship. Furthermore, he explains that a leader role is to include and see everyone.

The interviewee saw some positive impacts of working in a virtual environment, the first one being the management of time. P7 explains that he gained more time to do his work thanks to the lose of time waste such as traveling, meetings are done online.

Virtual work does not allow to clear the doubts an employee can have. According to the participants, when you have a question about a task you have to do, you have to schedule a meeting with someone later in the day and by that time you forget some of your questions. This has made the participant work harder in his opinion. The workplace environment is changed and the relationships with colleagues and subordinates can be compromised. Furthermore, the participant who recently took his position didn’t have the time to know properly his co-workers according to him. He added that under virtual leadership it is even harder to get to know the people you are working with. Furthermore, the participant explains that the engagement is decreased, and communication remain purely professional.

P7 presents the challenges of virtual leadership mostly as a communication challenge. Communication being strictly professional, the loss of small talk does not allowed a strong relationship between co-workers or with their leader. In addition, a leader has to be very clear in his statement during meetings because follow up questions are hard to answer due to the communication process.

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4.1.8 P8 Central Fulfilment Operations Manager

Managing a unit

P8 has six people directly reporting to him. All of them are managers as well and work for different three different units. The participant started at the company 15 years ago as a team leader.

P8 vision on leadership is to empower employees by delegating responsibility to them and to lead by example. Also, he explains leadership using the term “frame” to represent his expectations, this frame is very small at first and grow with the trust and quality of relationship he has with his subordinates. Furthermore, the participant explains that a leader must understand and respect the business, give value to every and each subordinate that does the work.

The participant sees everyone in a team as leader since everybody has responsibilities and will take lead by themselves to respect these responsibilities. Therefore, follower’s role does not exist for P8.

Having multiple personalities in a team is a perk according to the interviewee since it allows to disagree on some solution and find different ones. Having a team that disagrees to an extend is a strength.

Less waste of time with traveling for special meetings or other traveling necessities. Meetings are now shorter and more precise.

The loss of physical contact, the participant has not seen many subordinates in the workplace. Also, all communication is through technology and small talk is lost in the process. Isolation impacts the daily motivation to work. Participant 8 explains working at home safe from the virus created some sort of guilt due to employees who still must go to work and face the threat of being sick. Also, not being able to see the worker at the warehouse has a big impact on his moral. The transitioned caused difficulties in communication and the engagement of subordinates failed.

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According to the participant, virtual leadership is about having a clear communication, entrust your subordinates and try to maintain engagement for the part of your peers. Furthermore, virtual leaders receive a lot of information at the time and can be time consuming and P8 explains that multitasking is not the right thing to do, you have to focus on the person you have on the screen according to him.

5. Analysis

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The analysis chapter aims to connect the data collected with the literature review to achieve a theoretical perspective that will help us answer the research questions

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The most recurrent themes of the data collected will be the themes analyzed in this part. The managing a unit is not present in analysis since the goal of this theme was to present shortly the interviewee position and responsibilities.

5.1 Vision of leadership

The main notion of leadership we observed was building relationship. All the participants value the relationship they have with their employees and consider that a good leader is someone trustworthy of his employees and vice versa. In addition, leadership is about empowerment of employees said some participants. Empowerment consist in giving responsibility to people and help them reach goals they thought impossible.

Leadership in a virtual work environment : A case study of managers perception of transition to virtual leadership

Leadership in a

virtual work

environment

Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration

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