Leadership out of control?

Leadership at a Distance: Research in Technology Supported Work deals with an interesting and significant topic to both scientists and practitioners in various domains. As the core activities of production, consumption, and circulation as well as their components (management, technology, information) are more and more organized on a global scale (Castells, 2009), the challenges to the traditional view on leadership have become apparent. One of these challenges is the geographic distribution of work and the technological advances and competencies required to direct distributed teams. Editor Suzanne Weisband, associate professor at the University of Arizona, states in her introduction that because “many more people have the information to make decisions for themselves, leadership is no longer the sole responsibility of the CEO; it can be found at every level of an organization” (p. 3). Although it remains unclear what she meant by leadership, it would be naïve to believe that large organizations have been led by just one person, or say, a board of directors. Yukl (1999) mentioned 10 years ago that the leadership actions of any individual leader are, by far, less important than the collective leadership supplied by members of the organization. The book is divided into five sections, and I will discuss the most appealing studies of each section. The first section describes the new challenges and competences needed to exercise leadership at a distance. The second section captures a collection of field studies of leadership in distributed work settings. In a study on the consequences of leading geographically dispersed teams, Cummings (chapter 3) found that frequent face-to-face communication between leaders and distributed teams is related positively to performance. However, as Cummings correctly noticed, face-to-face communication is normally limited in distributed environments. Cummings claimed, therefore, that informal face-to-face communication can be easily replaced by email and mobile phone contact. Unfortunately, it would seem that his statement is not supported by his own research; he does not find a clear relation between use of email or mobile phones in communication and team performance (p. 47). Bradner and Mark (chapter 4) investigated the role of collocation in distance collaboration and examined how it affects leadership. They report that technological systems may help to improve coordination between two distributed teams because these systems ease information exchange. However, technology appeared to be unable to enhance trust among members of distributed teams (p. 66). Face-to-face contacts in the initial stage of the project are found to be vital in creating shared work norms and domain expertise. Xiao et al. (chapter 5) studied how physicians communicated when they were with the surgery team in the same room and when they were remotely observing the surgery with videoconferencing technologies. The study revealed that when the leader was distant, the communication between leader and a senior fellow, and from the senior fellow to the junior resident, increased, while at the same time instructions given decreased significantly. The third section in the book comprises three experiments in remote leadership. Balthazard et al. (chapter 7) found that face-to-face teams are more likely to demonstrate a higher level of leadership, while virtual teams more often demonstrated a lower level of leadership (p. 128). Because the interaction style of teams is found to be associated with the level of leadership, the authors proposed that preparatory interventions (team building activities or face-to-face introductions) are required before virtual teams can start their tasks effectively. Stasser and Augustinova (chapter 8) discovered that dispersed teams needed to know how information access was distributed across individual team members. In this study, the authors investigated how shared and unique information was communicated upward from team members to the team captain and the commander. Some teams received feedback after a scenario about what information had reached the commander, so they were able to adjust their communication strategies over time to correct or diminish information biases (p. 156). Moreover, JELLE GROENENDAAL B O O K R E V I E W S