This project will generate a concrete understanding of leadership in virtual organizations in the service of developing leadership capacity in modern organizations. The project evaluates an innovative and potentially transformative theory of leadership as a compilational multilevel process whereby "leadership" is comprised of the patterned interactions of multiple individuals collectively carrying out needed system functions. Three experiments test the core ideas of this leadership model, and develop tools for leadership assessment and program evaluation. These experiments manipulate configurations of leadership and observe the effects of doing so on the emergent structure of the collective, as well as the processes, states, and performance of these collectives.
The scientific study of leadership has long recognized that the behavior of leaders can have extraordinary effects on collectives including teams, units, and organizations. While much of the empirical research on leadership focuses on predicting outcomes that reside at the individual unit of analysis (e.g., job satisfaction, work performance), many of the situations where leaders are potentially most pivotal require complex collective interactions (e.g., coordination, information sharing). Disaster response, vaccine development, and provincial reconstruction are examples of goals that require action by large-scale collectives, and so require leaders to orchestrate the effort within those collectives. Not only do we need to understand how leaders shape collectives, but we need to understand how they shape loosely coupled virtual collectives or multiteam systems: large interdependent teams interacting through virtual tools, which are interdependent with one another in order to achieve at least one common goal. This project will yield practical insights for better management in these sorts of domains.
