Organizing and Leading Virtual Teams Through ICTs: A Sociomaterial Perspective

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Master’s Thesis

Organizing and Leading Virtual Teams Through ICTs:

A Sociomaterial Perspective

Wafaa Elbaghdady

Department: Informatics and Media

Course: Master’s Degree Project (30 credits)

Term: Spring 2020

Supervisor: Ruth Lochan Submission date: 21-12-2020

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Abstract

The adoption of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is increasing in organizations which is altering organising and leading teams in many ways. Organizations are moving toward adopting more dynamic and global work structures namely virtual teams which mostly rely on ICTs as the main form of communication. The study investigates leaders’

practices and their appropriation of ICTs in virtual teams while applying a sociomaterial perspective which views technology and leaders’ interaction with technology as interlinked.

The study employed qualitative approach based on data collected from two blogs run by Toptal which is a fully virtual company with no physical office. Additionally, cross-disciplinary journal articles were collected from Scopus database to perform an iterative content analysis and progressively develop meanings and results. The findings were organized according to two main categories: leaders’ practices and ICTs then analysed according to the five notions entailed in sociomateriality: materiality, inseparability, relationality, performativity and practices, as suggested by Jones (2014). The main contribution of the study was expanding knowledge about leadership practices and technology within virtual teams using a new theoretical lens. The study identified seven main practices of virtual team leaders including managing communication (formal, informal), supporting team technology adaptation, ensuring team alignment with goals, building team motivation, creating shared identity (culture), shaping trust, showing transparency, in addition to other practices like hiring self-motivated workers, managing time zones, encouraging innovation and creativity, leading by example, always being available, ensuring workers wellness and good listening. The study also identified ICTs that are commonly adopted by virtual team leaders such as Slack, email, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype and smartphones.

Keywords

ICTs, Leaders, Virtual Teams, Technology, Sociomateriality, E-leadership, Practice, Qualitative.

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List of Figures and Tables

Figure 3.1 Documents per year (2001-2019) related to the topic of sociomateriality in social sciences research

Figure 4.1 An overview of the process of content analysis Table 4.1 Overview of the leaders who wrote the blog articles Table 4.2 Terms used in the search

Table 4.3 Search strings and results Table 5.1 Other leaders’ practices Table 5.2 ICTs used to enable teamwork Figure 5.1 ICTs main categories

Figure 5.2 Examples of ICTs

Table 6.1 Forms of sociomateriality in leaders’ practices

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Glossary

Term Definition

E-leadership “A set of technology-mediated social influencing processes intended to change attitudes, feelings, thinking, behaviour, and performance.” (Roman et al., 2019, p. 862)

Information and

Communication Technologies (ICTs)

Devices or software used by social groups to communicate and collaborate.

Practice To do work of a particular type that requires knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.

Sociomateriality A theory within IS and organization studies that views technology and human interaction with technology as interlinked.

Technology A device or a software used to solve a problem or perform a function.

Virtual team A group of people who are driven by a common purpose and rely on ICTs as the main form of communication.

Virtual team leader A leader who constantly interact with technology to manage virtual teams.

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Abbreviations

Abbreviation Full form

AI Artificial Intelligence

ICTs Information and Communication Technologies

IoT Internet of things

IS Information Systems

ITU International Telecommunication Union

WHO World Health Organization

WWR We Work Remotely

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1 Introduction

This chapter gives an overview of the researched topic and states the research problem, purpose of the study and the proposed research question. The study delimitation and outline are also presented.

1.1 Background

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) will fundamentally transform business, organizations and leadership practices introducing new opportunities and challenges (Lilian, 2014). The International Telecommunication Union identifies four emerging ICTs - the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, big data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

These technologies are experiencing a rapid growth and expected to enhance performance and decrease cost through affordable components and availability of connectivity. The estimated global revenue from using these technologies was 296,744 (USD millions) in 2015 and is expected to double in 2020; furthermore, IoT and cloud services are expected to generate the highest revenue while AI is expected to record the highest growth (ITU, 2017).

The advancements in technology in addition to the rise of knowledge work and the increased complexity in team tasks push organizations to adopt more dynamic and global work structures such as virtual teams (Bell and Kozlowski, 2002). Thus, organizations’ shift towards virtual teams is growing and expected to continue to grow in the coming years (Dufrene and Lehman, 2012; Gilson et al., 2015). Virtual teams include co-located and geographically dispersed teams that mostly rely on ICTs as the main form of communication. Common examples of ICTs include email, chat applications, instant messaging, video conferencing, smartphones, file- sharing platforms and online social networks. A survey of 1620 respondents from 90 countries indicated that 89% of the respondents are part of at least one virtual team while 48% never met face-to-face and used only virtual communications such as conference calls, video conferencing, emails and social media tools to contact other team members (RW3 Culture Wizard, 2018). Virtual work was even enforced in times of crisis when the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in 2020 and advised business owners to let employees work from home to keep them safe and minimize the spread of the virus (WHO, 2020). This sudden shift to virtual work presented unexpected challenges for organizations and leaders.

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The topic of leading teams and the technologies facilitating their work is relevant to multiple fields (Gilson et al., 2015; Larson and DeChurch, 2020) including information systems, human-computer interaction, human resource management, leadership and organization studies. Researchers across these disciplines have highlighted the need for further research both theoretically and practically to help explore effective ways to lead teams with technological advancements (Gilson et al., 2015). In their review of virtual teams literature, Gilson et al.

highlight ten main themes and ten opportunities for future research; the main themes include technology, leadership, globalization, trust and ways to improve virtual teams’ outcomes, whereas one of the opportunities for future research is the use of emerging technologies such as 3D virtual environments, social media networks and cloud computing which are becoming more popular in organizations.

Researchers have relied on leadership theories such as transactional theory, transformational theory, leader-member exchange theory, trait approach theory and behavioural complexity theory to explore the relationship between leadership and technological change (Cortellazzo, Bruni and Zampieri, 2019). These theories might apply to leaders working face-to-face but might not be appropriate when studying e-leaders or leaders who work virtually. Cortellazzo, Bruni and Zampieri (2019) suggest that in order to understand technology implications for leaders, researchers need to apply new theoretical lenses from the social sciences and not just focus on traditional leadership theories. To understand the complex and dynamic phenomenon of working in virtual environments, Schultze and Orlikowski (2010) propose adopting a sociomaterial perspective that entails practices continuously performed through multiple boundaries, relations, entities and identities. Practice can be defined as “a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249). Practice is social and consists of both behaviour and understanding that is carried out by different individuals (Reckwitz, 2002).

Sociomateriality originally proposed by Orlikowski and Scott (2008) is seen as a promising stream of research that is based on a relational ontology. It is adopted by many researchers within IS and organization studies to understand the relationship between the social and the material in an increasingly digital world (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al., 2014). Sociomateriality shifts the focus from how humans and technology impact each other, to how humans and technology are enacted in activities and relations (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). Researchers

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have applied sociomateriality to study leadership practices (Oborn, Barrett and Dawson, 2013) and practices within virtual teams (Yu and Khazanchi, 2017; Swezey and Vertesi, 2019).

However, according to the researcher’s knowledge, leadership practices within virtual teams have not been studied from a sociomaterial lens.

1.2 Research Problem

Organizations are moving toward adopting virtual teams as a common work structure but working in virtual teams may come with challenges such as poor communication, lack of social interaction, difficulties in building trust and low levels of engagement. This also puts pressure on leaders of virtual teams who must deal with issues related to knowledge sharing, goal alignment and team motivation (Zander, Zettinig and Mäkelä, 2013). The challenges associated with virtual work highlights the need for advanced research on the topic to guide the use and management of virtual teams in organizations (Dulebohn and Hoch, 2017).

Virtual teams use ICTs to communicate, collaborate and transfer information. However, the rapid advancements in ICTs are changing how leaders interact with technology and other team members to support work processes and achieve organizational goals (Larson and DeChurch, 2020). Studying leadership and technology in virtual teams is important due to the growing organizational preference for using more ICTs, the increased volume of virtual communications and the unrealized impact of virtual communications on organizations (Roman et al., 2019).

Most of IS research conceptualize technologies as “relatively stable, discrete, independent, and fixed” (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001, p. 121). This includes research on virtual teams which often neglects technology use and its relation to practices (Bjørn and Ngwenyama, 2010).

Although studies like Malhotra, Majchrzak and Rosen (2007) identifies some practices of virtual team leaders, the use of technology was not highlighted. Hence, it is important to understand how technology can shape leaders practices, change their behaviour and affect the interaction with their followers (Cortellazzo, Bruni and Zampieri, 2019; Larson and DeChurch, 2020). To address this gap, the current study investigates leaders’ practices with a focus on how they use ICTs and different technological features to lead virtual teams. Studying the complexities of leaders’ practices can serve as a guide for organizations and leaders who want to adopt more virtual work settings. It can also give insights to technology designers on how to redesign technology to meet leaders’ expectations and support their work activities.

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1.3 Research Purpose

The purpose of this study is to expand knowledge about leadership and technology in the context of virtual teams as well as help inform the change in leaders’ practices to support team processes and organizational goals. The study identifies practices of virtual team leaders and their appropriation of ICTs by applying a sociomaterial perspective. Sociomateriality views technology and humans’ interaction with technology as interlinked which means that technology and humans are inseparable and hence cannot be studied in isolation of one another (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008).

1.4 Research Question

The study seeks to answer the following research question:

According to leaders of virtual teams, what are their practices taking into consideration their use of ICTs?

1.5 Delimitation

The study does not aim to identify team practices but focuses mainly on identifying leaders’

practices in a virtual work environment. The study does not attempt to identify all leadership practices but the most relevant ones according to the investigated sample. The study only considers hierarchal leadership in which each team has a single leader. It does not look at other types of leadership such as distributed leadership where the responsibilities of a team leader are shared among team members.

1.6 Outline

The rest of the study is organized as follows.

• Chapter 2 – Literature Review: This chapter presents existing research and concepts related to the research area.

• Chapter 3 – Theory: This chapter presents sociomateriality theory and its key notions which are used for the analysis.

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• Chapter 4 – Method: This chapter presents the overall methodological approach and describes the methods for data collection and data analysis with a justification of choice of methods. The research ethical considerations and researcher’s role are presented.

• Chapter 5 – Findings: This chapter presents the findings from the iterative content analysis organized in two main categories: leaders’ practices and ICTs.

• Chapter 6 – Analysis: This chapter presents the application of sociomateriality theory to the practices of virtual team leaders. The analysis is organized according to the five notions of sociomateriality: materiality, inseparability, relationality, performativity and practices.

• Chapter 7 – Discussion: This chapter discusses the findings, theory and methodological approach. It also presents limitations and suggestions for future research

• Chapter 8 – Conclusion.

• Chapter 9 – Appendices.

• References.

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2 Literature Review

This chapter clarifies existing research and presents the concepts required to frame this study including virtual teams, leading virtual teams, leaders’ practices and ICTs.

2.1 Virtual Teams

“Virtual teams are here, and they are here to stay” (Bell and Kozlowski, 2002, p. 45).

A virtual team is a group of people that are “1) Geographically dispersed (over different time

zones); 2) Driven by a common purpose; 3) Enabled by communication technologies;

4) Involved in cross-boundary collaboration” (Friedrich, 2017, pp. 15–16). Kirkman and Mathieu (2005) argue that team virtuality can occur even within co-located teams and that virtuality can be defined using three dimensions: the extent to which team members use ICTs to interact, the knowledge value from using those technologies and the degree of synchronicity of team members when they interact. Bell and Kozlowski (2002) argue that lack of face-to- face interaction between members of virtual teams is what make them virtual since co-located teams use the same ICTs (e.g. email) used by virtual teams to interact. For the purpose of the current study, virtual teams are defined as a group of people who are driven by a common purpose, rely on ICTs as the main form of communication and usually are (but not necessarily) geographically dispersed and come from different cultures.

Many organizations are spreading their operations across the globe and it became more critical to have virtual teams as the common work structure. But having employees located in various places is not the only reason why organizations prefer it. Virtual teams can also increase employees’ productivity, reduce costs and allow organizations to make better decisions based on a wider pool of experts from different backgrounds and skills (Dufrene and Lehman, 2012).

Having team members across different time zones allowed teams to work beyond eight hours per day maximizing overall productive time (Dulebohn and Hoch, 2017; Friedrich, 2017). A virtual team may reduce costs and time associated with travelling or commuting to work by almost 50% compared to a traditional team (Barnowska and Kozaryn, 2018). In many countries, time spent in travelling is considered part of the total working hours which means organizations must offer telecommuting remuneration. Less time spent on travelling would decrease organization financial expenses and improve employee satisfaction (Levasseur, 2012).

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On the other hand, the primary challenges of virtual teams work structure include “cultivating trust among team members; overcoming lack of face-to-face contact; overcoming communication barriers; aligning goals of individual team members; obtaining clarity regarding team objectives; ensuring that the team possesses necessary knowledge and skills;

ensuring the availability of sufficient technological resources; dealing with role uncertainty because members are on too many virtual teams” (Levasseur, 2012, p. 214).

2.2 Leading Virtual Teams (E-leadership)

Virtual team leaders perform a variety of roles including managing communication and team relationships, setting goals, resolving conflicts, maintaining motivation and trust, monitoring team performance and providing appropriate ICTs to facilitate team processes (Morley, Cormican and Folan, 2015). Researchers have also used the term e-leaders to refer to leaders of virtual teams. Roman et al. (2019) present e-leadership as a “multidimensional, integrated and comprehensive concept” (p. 861) in which six factors determine what makes an effective e-leader. The factors are e-communication (clarity, avoidance of errors and miscommunications), e-social (initiation of positive work environment through the right ICTs), e-change (planning, monitoring and evaluating organizational change through ICTs), e-team (building accountable teams, and providing motivation and recognition), e-tech (technical knowledge of ICT developments and its security), and e-trust (building trust through consistency and transparency while using ICTs). The authors conclude their study with a definition of e-leadership as a competence in virtual communications taking into consideration the above six factors. They define e-leadership “as a set of technology-mediated social influencing processes intended to change attitudes, feelings, thinking, behavior, and performance, which are based on ability to communicate clearly and appropriately, provide adequate social interaction, inspire and manage change, build and hold teams accountable, demonstrate technological know-how related to ICTs, and develop a sense of trust in virtual environments” (p. 862).

There are several challenges that leaders encounter when their teams work virtually. Zander, Zettinig and Mäkelä (2013) mentioned three main issues that need to be dealt with by virtual team leaders. First issue is alignment with goals since team members may have different goal assumptions which are shaped according to their culture and environment. These different assumptions may cause goal conflicts that are hardly detected by leaders. Second issue is

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knowledge sharing that can be hindered due to lack of interactive communication. Virtual team members may be in different time zones and rely on email communications that involve long response time reducing effectiveness. So, resolving communication boundaries and building trust among a multicultural team can be challenging for a virtual team leader. Third issue is initiating and sustaining team members motivation to fulfil their work. Leaders behaviours and preferences in organizing virtual teams may increase or decrease team engagement and commitment to work since each member of the team would have their own preferences and expectations from a leader.

2.3 Practices of Virtual Team Leaders

Based on the reviewed literature, the main practices of virtual team leaders that were identified are related to 1) managing communication process, 2) supporting team technology adaptation, 3) ensuring team alignment with goals, 4) building team motivation, 5) creating shared identity, 6) shaping trust and 7) showing transparency. These practices are the focus of the study and are presented next.

2.3.1 Managing Communication

Communication process refers to the transfer of information, meaning and understanding between two or more parties to facilitate collaboration, decision making and achieving business goals (Lilian, 2014). Communicating through ICTs is one of the defining characteristics of virtual teams and is highly associated with other team processes as well as team performance.

Marlow, Lacerenza and Salas (2017) discuss three elements of communication in virtual teams:

frequency, quality and content of communication in which frequency refers to the volume of communication transmitted using different ICTs or through face-to-face interactions, quality refers to the degree of clarity and accuracy of communication, while content is either communication related to performing tasks or for socializing purposes (formal or informal communication).

Communication in virtual teams can either be synchronous or asynchronous. “Synchronous exchanges occur in real time, whereas asynchronous exchanges involve a time lag” (Kirkman and Mathieu, 2005, p. 704). Research has shown that synchronous communication is necessary when dealing with complex and dynamic tasks that involves a lot of coordination, while

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asynchronous communication is more effective when performing simple and independent tasks (Bell and Kozlowski, 2002).

Communication using ICTs differ from face-to-face communication introducing more challenges for virtual teams and leaders. First, it is lacking nonverbal cues which cause misunderstanding and decreased team cohesion. Second, it requires virtual teams to communicate through multiple channels simultaneously which can cause information loss and problems in knowledge management. Third, it relies a lot on asynchronous communication causing delayed responses which can result in lower performance.

Leaders need to change their behaviour and communication pattern to meet the requirements of virtual teams and make the communication process more efficient and effective. They can encourage active and continuous communication that includes all team members and promote socializing activities which can build interpersonal relationships, enhance team cohesion and contribute to the overall success of the team (Lilian, 2014). Bell and Kozlowski (2002) propose that virtual team leaders need to focus on creating self-managing teams that have clear structures and share leadership functions. Hence, leaders are expected to provide direction, set and revise goals, monitor environmental conditions and create routines that encourage team engagement and collaboration (Bell and Kozlowski, 2002). Furthermore, leaders’ ability to convey nonverbal cues is essential when using ICTs for communication. To ensure an effective communication in virtual teams, leaders need to be skilful communicators who use language in an expressive way that can resolve any miscommunication and initiate a supportive working environment within the team (Darics, 2020).

2.3.2 Supporting Team Technology Adaptation

Virtual teams usually rely on a variety of ICTs to enable collaborative work. This required virtual team leaders to get more involved in managing technology adaptation and affecting team behavioural towards the technology they use. Leaders must adopt ICTs for their own use and select, recommend and support implementation of ICTs in their organizations and teams (Van Wart et al., 2017). They need to consider team interaction, members’ experience in using technology and cultural diversity when planning for adopting a new technology (Avolio, Kahai and Dodge, 2000). Technology adaptation does not only include adopting new ICTs, but also the use of new features of existing ICTs, discontinue using an existing ICT and modifying features of existing ICTs (Thomas and Bostrom, 2010a).

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Thomas and Bostrom (2010a) argue that leaders can strongly influence technology adaptation in virtual teams. Their findings show that managing technology adaptation can improve trust and cooperation in virtual teams which is positively related to team outcomes. Research has shown that participative leaders are more likely to influence technology adaptation than directive leaders (Avolio, Kahai and Dodge, 2000). For example, Thomas and Bostrom (2010a) found that a leadership style that facilitates, supports and mentors is more effective in technology adaptation than a leadership style that commands, controls and monitors.

Van Wart et al. (2017) propose that leaders must be aware of ICTs development and pursue the ones related to their industry and organizational needs. Leaders also must be able to assess a variety of ICTs, be willing to invest the time and effort to implement them as well as possess technical, analytical and decision making skills to affect technology use (Van Wart et al., 2017).

2.3.3 Ensuring Team Alignment with Goals

Alignment with goals is the extent to which team member’s goals are linked to team goals, which Campion, Medsker and Higgs (1993) refer to as goal interdependence. A team’s goal is

“a future state of affairs desired by enough members of a team to motivate the team to work toward its achievement” (Tohidi, 2011, p. 1140). Working towards achieving a common goal is one of the defining characteristics of teams and virtual teams. However, staying aligned with team goals is more challenging in virtual teams due to the multiple interpretations of overall goals and unspoken tacit knowledge about goals (Zander, Zettinig and Mäkelä, 2013). For example, a team member from the United States may focus on achieving maximum profits in a short time, another member from a Scandinavian country aims to benefit the society while a member from China may be concerned with building a good reputation for the organization.

The team needs to have clearly defined goals to be able to cope with them. Leaders need to run a high-quality goal setting process taking into consideration four factors which are team members’ valence, instrumentality, self-efficacy and trust (Hertel, Konradt and Orlikowski, 2004). These respectively refer to clarifying team goals and linking them to members’ interests, ensuring that each team member understands the importance of their contribution to the team, realizing team members capabilities to achieve tasks, and building trust by maintaining fair working conditions, giving regular feedback and adopting reliable ICTs.

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Leaders need to focus on creating common interpretation of goals particularly at the initial phase of constructing a team (Zander, Zettinig and Mäkelä, 2013). They can encourage team discussions on objectives and purpose and relate it to organizational objectives. It is also important for leaders to monitor the progress of the team and inform them of any changes in conditions, strategies and goals to adjust their performance accordingly (Bell and Kozlowski, 2002). This can be facilitated by using an application with goal-tracking function where team members report their personal goals and progress while team leaders regularly update team goals (Friedrich, 2017).

2.3.4 Building Team Motivation

Motivation at work is “a set of energetic forces that originate both within as well as beyond an individual’s being, to initiate work-related behavior, and to determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration” (Pinder, 2008, p. 11). Work motivation is generally associated with improved performance which makes it essential for the success of teams and organizations.

The majority of research on work motivation has been focused on individual motivation and relatively few studies has looked at team motivation (Kozlowski and Bell, 2013). Hu and Liden (2015) define team motivation from a social aspect as team member’s desire to benefit other members and achieve team goals. Team motivation can have a significant impact on team effectiveness especially when team members tasks are highly interdependent (Hu and Liden, 2015).

Virtual teams might experience reduced motivation and commitment towards achieving team goals due to their geographical dispersion and cultural differences (Hertel, Konradt and Orlikowski, 2004; Zander, Zettinig and Mäkelä, 2013). Motivation in virtual teams originates within individuals but can be influenced by external factors such as leadership styles and leadership behaviours (Jenster and Steiler, 2011). The authors’ findings show that compassionate and supportive leadership behaviours are positively corelated to motivation in virtual teams.

Research suggests that giving rewards and recognition of team efforts increase individual and team motivation to perform (Friedrich, 2017). The process of giving and receiving regular feedback through meetings and written surveys is also important for motivating members of virtual teams (Friedrich, 2017). To build motivation within virtual teams, leaders need to provide guidance on how team members can allocate and coordinate tasks as well as facilitate communication and interaction between team members to build stronger interpersonal relations

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(Hu and Liden, 2015). Setting clear goals, creating a team-based reward system and structuring interdependent team tasks are examples of leaders’ practices that can positively affect motivation and performance within virtual teams (Hertel, Konradt and Orlikowski, 2004).

Leaders need to enable communication to increase team sense of involvement and they need to be attentive to solving conflicts that the team may encounter. Furthermore, organizations need to ensure that individual and team motivation are aligned to enhance team motivation (Kozlowski and Bell, 2013).

2.3.5 Creating Shared Identity

Shared or collective identity is defined as “an individual's cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution” which can be expressed through cultural materials (Pollettal and Jasper, 2001, p. 285). Virtual team members may identify themselves with a profession, organization or team (Mattarelli and Tagliaventi, 2010). In the current study, more emphasis is given to team identity which is team members’

sense of belonging, emotional attraction and effort towards achieving team goals (Webster and Wong, 2008). Researchers have used different terminology to describe team identity such as teamness, belonging, group cohesion, team spirit, team commitment, oneness and collective awareness (Stawnicza, 2015). Stronger team identity contribute to improved performance, increased trust and collaboration, and higher personal satisfaction and self-esteem among team members (Webster and Wong, 2008). Team identity could be helpful for improving communication, and is also associated with reduced team conflicts (Mortensen and Hinds, 2001).

A shared team identity could be difficult to establish in virtual teams. Virtual team members often come from different countries, backgrounds and cultures which might impact individual’s sense of belonging and identification with the team. Team members find it difficult to adapt to unusual behaviours or attitudes of other members which might cause disagreements. Research has shown that cultural diversity and physical dispersion in virtual teams could disturb communication and coordination and lead to sub-group identification where team members who are co-located or from similar cultural backgrounds easily interact with each other (Au and Marks, 2012). Cultural diversity also comes with language barriers that can lead to communication challenges and loss of information. Au and Marks (2012) found that similar working and cultural practices in a virtual team result to stronger identification while different working practices and language barriers could negatively affect team identification.

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It is important to learn about the individual identity of team members to create shared understanding in virtual teams (Kimble, 2011). Individual identity in virtual teams is ambiguous as physical cues of face-to-face interaction are absent. To overcome the difficulties in creating common identity in virtual teams, leaders need to effectively manage communication among team members and show each team member how their job contribute to the wider organization (Kimble, 2011). Leaders can emphasize team identity by defining a clear vision for the team, creating motivation, highlighting common interests and training team members to embrace differences (Webster and Wong, 2008). Furthermore, team members’

efforts to achieve success need to be recognized and valued in order to build a strong team identity and beat feelings of isolation (Au and Marks, 2012).

2.3.6 Shaping Trust

Trust is the positive and confident expectation of another individual’s action (Pinjani and Palvia, 2013). In a team context, trust can be defined as “the shared willingness of the team members to be vulnerable to the actions of the other team members based on the shared expectation that the other team members will perform particular actions that are important to the team” (Breuer, Hüffmeier and Hertel, 2016, p. 1152). Members of virtual teams need to trust each other, their leader and the organization in order to be effective. Trust in traditional co-located teams is established by observing physical behaviours. These behaviours are difficult to observe in virtual teams which could affect team trust. Alternatively, trust in virtual teams is shaped by the technology and team member interactions (Ford, Piccolo and Ford, 2017).

Trust is positively correlated with knowledge sharing and it is crucial for team effectiveness and relationship building (Pinjani and Palvia, 2013). In their review, Gilson et al. (2015) found that interpersonal trust as well as trust in technology are relevant for knowledge sharing, while lack of these types of trust could negatively affect knowledge sharing. Trust is also positively related to performance including member performance, team performance, learning effectiveness and creative problem solving, member well-being including satisfaction and morale, and member support including cooperation and team cohesion (Hacker et al., 2019).

Virtual team leaders usually manage people from multiple nations, cultures and time zones. To create trust in the diversified virtual team, leaders need to accommodate the circumstances of each team member and help them accommodate each other’s circumstances (Ford, Piccolo and

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Ford, 2017). Leaders become more sensitive to these differences by learning and obtaining information about each member of the team and paying attention to their emotional state and well-being. They are also responsible for resolving team conflicts rising from team differences as soon as they occur. Leaders awareness of team differences and their ability to resolve conflicts increase trust among team members as well as team trust in the leader.

Leaders play an important role in steering trust creation in virtual teams through their behaviour and actions. They can promote trust through increasing team motivation, enhancing coherence, creating positive environment and managing communication with the right ICTs (Lilian, 2014).

To influence trust creation, they need to continuously communicate with their teams to provide work-related information which help the team stay engaged and perform their duties, and provide information about social activities in the organization which facilitates informal communication and prevents feelings of isolation (Ford, Piccolo and Ford, 2017). Other activities that could be performed by leaders to promote trust in virtual teams include recognizing team accomplishments and initiating face-to-face contact with all team members at least once a year and virtually on a weekly basis (Ford, Piccolo and Ford, 2017).

2.3.7 Showing Transparency

Online social transparency is the visibility of data and “the ability to observe and monitor the interactions of others within and across applications” which can have three forms: identity transparency, content transparency and interaction transparency (Stuart et al., 2012). Identity transparency refers to the visibility of identity, for example, virtual team leaders who use their real names and give accurate personal information across different social networks are considered to have a strong identity transparency. Content transparency refers to the visibility of actions. Leaders can encourage their teams to use project management applications like Trello that keeps track of team tasks, their status and assigned team member to make team progress visible to everyone. Interaction transparency refers to the visibility of a third party observing an interaction between two or more individuals like when team members know that their interaction and information sharing is observed by the team leader.

Social transparency along with a leader’s self-awareness, balanced processing of information and morals are the main factors influencing authentic leadership (Jiang and Men, 2017).

Authentic leaders openly share information with team members, show consistency in their beliefs and actions, freely express their own ideas and give team members the opportunity to

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share their opinions. They need to be perceived as honest, fair and consistent when using ICTs to positively influence trust building in virtual teams (Roman et al., 2019). Korzynski (2013) found that online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are considered useful tools for supporting transparent and authentic leadership. The results of the same study revealed that the usefulness of online social networks for supporting authentic leaders is positively related to the number of online activities as well as the number of social networks used by leaders to communicate with their followers (Korzynski, 2013).

Leaders who emphasize transparency by instilling open and honest communication with team members can directly or indirectly impact virtual team dynamics. They can directly improve information sharing among team members which in turn would increase team creativity (Hahm, 2017). Additionally, research has shown that transparency level in groups that use ICTs to communicate can directly influence accountability, trustworthiness and behaviours of group members and can indirectly influence information quality, productivity, innovation and stress (Stuart et al., 2012). Transparency of organizations and leaders in manging communication can also lead to increased employee engagement and foster their overall well-being (Jiang and Men, 2017).

2.4 ICTs

ICTs can refer to “1) information and communication systems that provide broad functionalities such as an office information system, 2) technological tools used by individuals to communicate, and 3) the evolving field of information and communication technology as a whole” (Van Wart et al., 2017, p. 528). For this study, the second definition is used within a business context which includes technologies used by employees and organizations to support communication in a globalized economy (Zuppo, 2012). Common examples of ICTs include email, chat applications, instant messaging, video conferencing, smartphones, file-sharing platforms and online social networks. These technologies are used by employees mainly for information sharing and collaboration purposes.

Larson and DeChurch (2020) suggest that technology could be studied from four different perspectives to understand its implications for teams and leaders. According to the authors, the four technology perspectives are defined as follows along with examples of focal technologies associated with each perspective:

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• Technology as context has mostly fixed features which constrains teamwork. Examples of technologies are email, video conferencing and Group Decisions Support Systems.

• Technology as sociomaterial practices emphasizes work practices to explain how team needs are met using technological features. Examples of technologies are crowd platforms, enterprise social media and recommender systems.

• Technology as creation medium enables team formation within and outside of formal organizations. Examples of technologies are forums and other digital platforms (e.g.

Wikipedia).

• Technology as a teammate fulfils a distinct role and contributes to teamwork. Examples of technologies are AI, social robots and intelligent machines.

The current study treats technology as sociomaterial practice and applies sociomateriality theory to explore leaders’ practices and their appropriation of technology within virtual teams.

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3 Theory

This chapter presents the theory adopted in the study, the key notions entailed in it and why it is suitable for the study.

3.1 Sociomateriality Theory

This study adopts sociomateriality theory which views technology and human interaction with technology as interlinked. It assumes that humans/organizations and technology “exist only through their temporally emergent constitutive entanglement” (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008, p.

457). Sociomateriality emphasizes that technologies do not exist alone or have inherent properties, but their material characteristics and capabilities are extremely related to practices (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011). Since this study explores leaders’ practices and their use of technologies, applying sociomateriality theory proved appropriate for the purpose of studying technology features and leaders’ practices jointly.

Researchers have applied sociomateriality in different contexts. Oborn, Barrett and Dawson (2013) examined leadership in health policy formulation while emphasizing the dynamic relationship between individuals, structures and different forms of materiality such as tools, technologies, public polls and statistics. Their findings highlighted that leadership is shaped by sociomaterial practices rather than inherent in one actor. They also found that social processes as legitimacy and trust can be established through leadership practices. Swezey and Vertesi (2019) used a sociomaterial perspective to identify the challenges of working in virtual teams with a focus on how team members interact and collaborate using material and digital tools.

Their findings highlighted the importance of sustaining common ground, enabling shared workspace and addressing physical workplace in virtual teams. Yu and Khazanchi (2017) studied virtual teams during crisis to understand the relationship between team shared understanding and their adaptive use of technology capabilities in crisis time. The authors suggested applying a practice-oriented sociomaterial perspective and using patterns to describe effective practices within virtual teams.

The main contribution to sociomateriality theory originated from the work of Orlikowski and Scott (2008). The interest in sociomateriality has been growing since then and more researchers in the social sciences has been referring to Orlikowski and Scott’s work when using this concept. This was obvious when searching Scopus database using the terms sociomaterial*

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OR socio-material* which showed that the number of documents relevant to sociomateriality is growing since 2009 (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Documents per year (2001-2019) related to the topic of sociomateriality in social sciences research

The roots of sociomateriality lie in preceding theories as sociotechnical systems, actor network theory and practice theory (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al., 2014). Sociotechnical systems theory addresses the entanglement of the technical and the social in organizational work, actor network theory adopts a relational view in which social interactions are performed and enacted by human and non-human actors, while practice theory views practices as central component of social phenomena. Sociomateriality is also associated with adaptive structuration theory (Larson and DeChurch, 2020) which assumes that social systems are (re)produced through human interaction. However, adaptive structuration theory neglects the role of technology and focuses only on the social aspects.

Technology implications on work, leaders and organizations can be studied from different social lenses. Researchers can either focus on the interactions between people and technology over time or focus on technology role and how it is entangled in everyday practice (Cascio and Montealegre, 2016). This study adopts the second view which assumes that there are no independent entities with inherent characteristics but entities as humans and technology

“relationally entail or enact each other in practice” (Orlikowski, 2007, p. 1438). This view

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was adopted in studies like Jones (2014) and Scott and Orlikowski (2014). Jones (2014) applied sociomateriality to examine how introducing a new clinical information system in a hospital critical care unit can impact work practices, while Scott and Orlikowski (2014) applied sociomateriality to examine how the use of social media can shape anonymity in hotel evaluation practice. Both studies assumed that work practices are constitutively entangled through engagement with technology and other material entities.

3.2 Key Notions of Sociomateriality

Jones (2014) recognises five key notions entailed in sociomateriality theory which are materiality, relationality, inseparability, performativity and practices. When applying sociomateriality in IS research, it is advised to look at these notions individually in order to understand the relationship between the social and the material (Jones, 2014). The key notions of sociomateriality are defined as follows:

Materiality refers to physical and social properties of a material artefact which can include technological features, physical objects, work environment, devices, applications, data and algorithms. Material means can be viewed as constitutive of both activities and identities not just tools used to perform a task (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008).

Relationality means that entities as humans and technology exist in relation to each other and

“have no inherent properties, but acquire form, attributes, and capabilities through their interpenetration” (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008, pp. 455–456). Therefore, humans and technology determine practices in a relational dynamic and not independently of each other (Jones, 2014).

Inseparability means that humans and technology are inherently inseparable and hence cannot be studied in isolation of one another (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). “There is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social” (Orlikowski, 2007, p. 1437). Entities as humans and technology are not independent of each other and any distinction between them is only analytical.

Performativity highlights that “relations and boundaries between humans and technologies

are not pre-given or fixed, but enacted in practice” (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008, p. 462).

A performative ontology views a phenomenon as dynamic and “performed—made real—in ongoing practices” (Scott and Orlikowski, 2014, p. 879). Performativity is not limited to

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performance or the action of doing an activity, it refers to several elements that create as well as describe a phenomenon (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). For example, a person’s identity can be described by actions, behaviours, beliefs and expressions, and his/her identity is (re)constituted by these characteristics.

Practices comprise an array of sociomaterial agencies such as space, devices, applications, standards and human characteristics that are (re)configured in everyday work. Practices help understand the relations and boundaries and how they are enacted in recurrent activities.

(Orlikowski and Scott, 2008)

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4 Method

This chapter describes the research approach, methods for data collection and data analysis with a justification of choice of methods as well as research ethical considerations. Finally, researcher’s role in conducting the research is described.

4.1 Methodological Approach

This study employed qualitative research method which is widely used by researchers from the social sciences field. Researchers use qualitative approach to gain a better understanding of human behaviour in different relational, organizational and virtual contexts (Tracy, 2013).

Qualitative methods refer to “the collection, analysis, and interpretation of interview, participant observation, and document data in order to understand and describe meanings, relationships, and patterns” (Tracy, 2013, p. 36). The purpose of qualitative research is to help understand a social phenomenon in its natural settings. Qualitative research seeks answers to questions about lived experience, personal experience, understanding and meaning such as why people behave the way they do or how they are affected by the world they live in. Qualitative research uses in-depth data from a small focused sample usually between five and eight in order to get valuable results (Tracy, 2013). The results produced from qualitative research are often not generalizable but give in-depth explanation and meaning of a situation.

An iterative approach (Tracy, 2013) was followed to analyse the empirical data while reflecting on related literature. The empirical data was derived from two online blogs run by Toptal company (www.toptal.com/insights and www.staffing.com). Toptal was selected because it is one of the largest companies in the world that runs 100% virtually with no physical office (WWR, no date; Caminiti, 2018). It was launched in 2009 and serves thousands of clients, including many Fortune 500 companies, providing them with top talents from different backgrounds such as business, design, and technology. The blogs were written by leaders who work virtually and gave insights about the future of work, virtual teams and technology. These leaders are experts in virtual work which would help in exploring current practices of virtual team leaders and their use of technology. The analysis used journal articles from Scopus database (www.scopus.com) that were selected based on focused search terms and a predefined criteria. The search terms are given in Table 4.2 which included ‘virtual team’ (Al-Ani, Horspool and Bligh, 2011; Hirschy, 2011; Avolio et al., 2014; Morley, Cormican and Folan,

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2015; Adamovic, 2018; Cortellazzo, Bruni and Zampieri, 2019) and other synonym terms such as ‘distributed team’ (Thomas and Bostrom, 2010b; Al-Ani, Horspool and Bligh, 2011),

‘remote team’ (Lumseyfai et al., 2019) and ‘dispersed team’ (Ruiller et al., 2019) since the study investigates leaders’ practices in the context of virtual teams. The terms ict and technolog* (technology, technologies, technological) were included in the search since the use of technology within virtual teams is also being investigated. The terms lead* (lead, leadership, leader) and manag* (manage, management, manager) were included in the search to focus on leaders/managers of virtual teams. The terms practice and socio* (sociomaterial, socio- material, sociomateriality, socio-materiality) were included in the search to investigate practices of leaders in addition to any connections made to sociomateriality. The term e- leadership frequently occurred in the literature, so it was added to the researched terms. After conducting the search using the above terms, the articles were evaluated based on the following criteria:

1. Studies about teams with less focus on team leaders were excluded.

2. Studies that do not link between technology and leaders’ practices were excluded.

3. Studies conducted using student teams were excluded.

4. Empirical and theoretical studies were included.

5. Studies from different disciplines were included.

Scopus was selected because it provides access to peer-reviewed articles in different research areas including social sciences and humanities. An additional reason for using Scopus is that it gives broader coverage compared to other databases (Moed, 2009; Zupic and Čater, 2015).

Furthermore, literature on sociomateriality theory, which was mainly based on the work of Orlikowski and Scott (2008) and other studies by Orlikowski, was also used in the analysis.

The research design adopted in this study was content analysis since the study was based on written material. Content analysis organizes the data in meaningful categories to draw realistic conclusions (Bengtsson, 2016). The study followed the four main stages presented by Bengtsson (2016) when conducting content analysis. Those are planning, data collection, data analysis and presentation of results/conclusions, wherein the last two stages were conducted simultaneously. An overview of the research process is presented in Figure 4.1.

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Figure 4.1 An overview of the process of content analysis

4.2 Planning

The planning started by identifying the aim of the study and formulating an initial research question. The sample included virtual team leaders since the focus of the study is to explore and describe their practices. Previous studies were included to inform the analysis process and construct stronger argument. Finally, methods of data collection and analysis were determined, and ethical considerations were recognized.

4.3 Data Collection

Data was collected from insights written by team leaders working virtually which is publicly available on two blogs run by Toptal Company. Using blogs is not time-consuming as other

Planning

Presentation of Results Data Analysis

Data Collection Identify the aim of the study

Determine the sample (leaders working remotely, previous studies) Select methods of data collection and analysis

Get necessary approvals and other ethical considerations

Select data sources (Toptal blogs, Scopus) Select main terms to conduct the search

Collect leaders’ insights and journal articles for the study Collect literature on sociomateriality

First-cycle coding

Second-cycle coding

Apply sociomateriality theory

Develop first-level codes

Group first-level codes into themes &

report findings according to those themes Analyse findings according to the five

notions of sociomateriality

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qualitative methods like interviews and observations and it provides “a novel and rich resource for researchers to acquire empirical data” (Jones and Alony, 2008). The study used online data because setting interviews with leaders can be challenging since they are usually hard to access and have busy schedule. Furthermore, journal articles were collected from Scopus database to progressively develop patterns, themes and categories in an iterative process.

4.3.1 Leaders’ Insights

The insights were written by leaders who work virtually. Hence, they have the expertise required to answer the research question. On Toptal website, it is stated that their “content comes directly from the source: experts in their respective fields”. Toptal blogs were accessed during the period from 20 February 2020 to 7 March 2020 to collect the data. The blogs do not provide an advance search tool, so the articles were self-selected. The blog articles were included if they describe leaders’ practices in virtual teams. They were examined by reading the title then skimming through the article to determine its relevance. This approach is referred to as purposive sampling and is typically used in qualitative research that seeks depth rather than breadth in understanding a phenomenon (Etikan, Musa and Alkassim, 2016). A final dataset of six blog articles were selected for the analysis (Appendix A) which were written by five male leaders and one female. Other details about the leaders are provided in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1 Overview of the leaders who wrote the blog articles

Leader Position Organization Business

1 VP of People Toptal HR Services

2 Co-founder Time Doctor Software

3 CEO PeopleG2 HR Services and Software

4 VP of Sales Toptal HR Services

5 VP of Product Toptal HR Services

6 Head of Projects Toptal HR Services

4.3.2 Journal Articles

The journal articles were collected from Scopus database which was accessed on 27 February 2020. Scopus gives access to peer-reviewed articles related to different areas. It has an advanced search tool to choose year of publication, subject area, document type and many other

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filter options. To find journal articles relevant to the study, the main search was conducted using terms derived from the research question as shown in Table 4.2.

Table 4.2 Terms used in the search

Term 1 Term 2 Term 3 Term 4

‘Virtual team’

‘Distributed team’

‘Remote team’

‘Dispersed team’

ICT

Technolog*

Lead*

Manag*

Practice Socio*

E-leadership

The terms were used in combination as shown in Table 4.3 to look for a match in the (article title, abstract or keywords). The search considered journal articles in English within the last ten years which returned 71 articles. Only journal articles were considered as they offer theoretical and empirical approaches to current perspectives in academic research. They are also assumed to be more credible and of higher quality due to the process of peer-review which is the primary instrument to scientific knowledge advancement (Kronick, 1990). Journal articles with at least one citation were considered since the number of citations could determine the intellectual influence of an article, its impact and quality (Moed, 2009). Thus, 53 cited articles were considered for review (Appendix B).

Table 4.3 Search strings and results

Search string (within the past 10 years) Number of documents ( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "virtual team" OR "distributed team" OR "remote

team" OR "dispersed team" ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ( lead* OR manag* ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ( technolog* OR ict ) AND TITLE- ABS-KEY ( practice OR socio* OR e-leadership ) ) AND PUBYEAR

> 2009

163

Search string (within the past 10 years, language is English and source type is journal)

Number of documents

( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "virtual team" OR "distributed team" OR "remote team" OR "dispersed team" ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ( lead* OR manag* ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ( technolog* OR ict ) AND TITLE- ABS-KEY ( practice OR socio* OR e-leadership ) ) AND PUBYEAR

> 2009 AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , "English" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SRCTYPE , "j" ) )

71

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The next phase of the data collection was to qualitatively select the articles by reading the abstract and skimming other parts of the article (if required). Appendix B lists the reviewed articles highlighting the focus of the study and the reason for exclusion, while Appendix C lists the final dataset of nine articles that were selected for the analysis.

4.4 Data Analysis and Presentation of Results

An iterative approach was followed to analyse the empirical data while reflecting on related literature. Iterative analysis connects empirical data to current literature and existing theories in an alternating fashion in order to progressively refine meanings (Tracy, 2013). Leaders’

insights were downloaded from the blog and saved in PDF format then imported to QDA Miner Lite Software. Codes were inserted and linked to relevant passages using the ‘Add’ function where a name, category and colour were defined for each code. A code is “a word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data” (Saldaña, 2013, p. 3). The first-cycle coding was performed using In Vivo codes which are exact words or phrases derived from the original data (Saldaña, 2013). This method of coding was used to ensure that the data are presented objectively as they occurred in the original text. The second-cycle coding involved identifying patterns and grouping first-level codes into larger categories and themes which were developed from the data as well as the reviewed literature. A full list of categories, themes and codes is generated using QDA Miner Lite and presented in Appendix D. Frequency counts method (LeCompte, 2000) was also applied to investigate the use of different ICTs. This was done by utilizing the ‘Coding Frequency’ and ‘Chart’ functions available in QDA Miner Lite to produce word clouds (Figure 5.1 and Figure 5.2).

The results were presented in relation to two main categories: leaders’ practices and ICTs.

Leaders’ practices included eight themes: managing communication (formal, informal), supporting team technology adaptation, ensuring team alignment with goals, building team motivation, creating shared identity (culture), shaping trust, showing transparency and other practices. Whereas, ICTs included three themes: examples of ICTs and their purpose, synchronous vs. asynchronous ICTs and rich vs. low rich media ICTs. Finally, the findings were analysed according to the five notions of sociomateriality identified by Jones (2014):

materiality, relationality, inseparability, performativity and practices.

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4.5 Ethical Considerations

According to the Swedish Research Council, research ethics is divided to two parts. First is researcher’s personal conduct and second is ethics related to the nature of the research. For the first part, the following main principles were adhered to:

• “Reliability in safeguarding the quality of the research, which is reflected in the design, method, analysis and use of resources.

• Honesty in developing, implementing and scrutinising research, and in reporting and informing others about research in an open, fair, complete and objective way.

• Respect for colleagues, research participants, society, ecosystems, cultural heritage and the environment.

• Accountability for research from idea to publication, for management and organisation, for education, supervision and mentorship, and for their wider consequences.” (Swedish Research Council, 2019)

The second part which is ethics related to the nature of the research are minimal or even not applicable since no participants or interviewees were recruited. The collected data was available for researchers and the public through online resources which does not require any special permission to use. Additionally, Toptal’s consent to use the content of their blogs was obtained.

4.6 Researcher’s Role

The researcher is considered the research instrument in qualitative research. This might introduce some subjectivity and bias in collecting and interpreting the data which relies on the researcher own experience and judgement. The researcher tried to reduce bias as much as possible by following several steps. First, the analysis was performed to answer a research question of an explorative nature rather than support/reject a hypothesis, which means that the researcher performed the analysis without any presumptions about what results she might get.

Second, the articles were examined three times at the data collection phase to avoid missing any article that could be relevant. Third, reporting of results reflected leaders’ opinions and was re-evaluated several times during the study to avoid mistakes in interpreting original data.

Fourth, methodological triangulation was applied in which more than one data source (online blogs, Scopus) was used to answer the research question. Triangulation practice is known to reduce bias and produce more credible qualitative results (Tracy, 2013).

Organizing and Leading Virtual Teams Through ICTs: A Sociomaterial Perspective

Master’s Thesis