109. "Effective Leadership in Virtual-Like Organizational Arrangements"

ABSTRACT

Most studies of leadership focus on leaders who have responsibility for a group of people. This group is usually either an organization or a unit within one. Almost always the leader is collocated with the "followers" and interacts with them in real time (i.e., synchronized communication). But what about leading when the group lies outside the usual lines of communication set off by the formal organizational structure; when its members are geographically distributed, when they do not belong to the same organization; and when many of the communications are asynchronized, multi-media, over multi-time zones, and criss-cross other countries, functions, and cultures? Leading these untraditional groups is still leading but, outside of the usual hierarchy, the leadership processes can be more dynamic, complex, and technologically dependent.