Leadership Communication in a Virtual Team

Abstract

This paper examines how leadership is accomplished in a virtual team. The data consists of 400 emails from a distributed work group (Agenda) in a Norwegian tele-company. The study has primarily a discursive approach to leadership and aims at identifying what kinds of discursive devices the leader of Agenda uses to create trust and ingroup solidarity, and how she, by the linguistic form of her requests, positions her self towards her subordinates. The results show that the leader displays an egalitarian leader role, building personal and emotional ties and downplays her authority. By giving the group a positive loaded nick-name and creating a success story for the group, the leader invites to group identification. Requests are produced as needs and hopes, and presented as a personal matter rather than an institutional obligation. While her institutional role as leader is downplayed when performing requests to her subordinates, it is explicitly fore grounded when performing requests to external partners.