ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how “virtuality” alters the leadership of global teams, a topic that has received limited attention in previous research. It integrates research on cross-cultural leadership with recent work on global virtual teams and shows how the virtual environment impedes the efforts of managers to be accessible, caring, and people-oriented leaders. Current leadership research is largely based on the assumption that leaders are able to lead, thanks to close, sustained, and personalized relationships with their employees. Global virtual teams characterized by national, cultural, and linguistic heterogeneity have become commonplace. They can be defined as groups of people who work together using communications technology, are distributed across space, are responsible for a joint outcome, and so on. The chapter details a case study of a Finnish multinational corporation operating in the high-tech sector. China represented an important region for the case company.
