Olsen Olav Kjellevold, Ågotnes Kari Wik, Hetland Jørn, Espevik Roar, Ravnanger Conrad Alexander
Department of Psychosocial Sciences, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.
Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jun 2;14:1188753. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1188753. eCollection 2023.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, most of the workforce moved from office setting to home-office and virtual teamwork. Whereas the relationship between leadership and team cooperation in physical settings is well documented - less is known about how daily virtual team cooperation is influenced by daily constructive as well as destructive leadership, and how intervening mechanisms influence this relationship. In the present study, we test the direct effect of daily transformational- and passive avoidant leadership, respectively, on the daily quality of virtual team cooperation - and the moderating effect of task interdependence. Using virtual team cooperation as outcome, we hypothesized that (a) transformational leadership relates positively to virtual team cooperation, (b) passive-avoidant leadership relates negatively, and (c) moderated by task interdependence. Our hypotheses were tested in a 5-day quantitative diary study with 58 convenience sampled employees working from home in virtual teams. The results show that virtual team cooperation is a partially malleable process - with 28% variation in daily virtual team cooperation resulting from within team variation from day to day. Surprisingly, the results of multilevel modeling lend support only to the first hypothesis (a). Taken together, our findings suggest that in virtual settings, inspirational and development-oriented transformational leadership plays a key role in daily team cooperation, while passive-avoidance has little impact - independently of task interdependence. Hence, in virtual team settings, the study shows that "good is stronger than bad" - when comparing the negative effects of destructive leadership to the positive effect of constructive and inspirational leadership. We discuss the implications of these findings for further research and practice.
在新冠疫情期间，大部分劳动力从办公室环境转移到了居家办公和虚拟团队协作。虽然在实体环境中领导力与团队合作之间的关系已有充分记录，但对于日常虚拟团队合作如何受到日常建设性和破坏性领导力的影响，以及干预机制如何影响这种关系，我们所知甚少。在本研究中，我们分别测试了日常变革型领导和被动回避型领导对虚拟团队合作日常质量的直接影响，以及任务相互依存性的调节作用。以虚拟团队合作为结果变量，我们假设：（a）变革型领导与虚拟团队合作呈正相关；（b）被动回避型领导与虚拟团队合作呈负相关；（c）任务相互依存性起调节作用。我们通过一项为期5天的定量日记研究对这些假设进行了检验，研究对象为58名通过便利抽样选取的在家中以虚拟团队形式工作的员工。结果表明，虚拟团队合作是一个部分可塑的过程——日常虚拟团队合作中28%的差异源于团队内部日复一日的变化。令人惊讶的是，多层次建模的结果仅支持第一个假设（a）。综合来看，我们的研究结果表明，在虚拟环境中，具有启发性和以发展为导向的变革型领导在日常团队合作中起着关键作用，而被动回避型领导的影响很小——与任务相互依存性无关。因此，在虚拟团队环境中，该研究表明，与破坏性领导的负面影响相比，建设性和启发性领导的积极影响更为显著，即“善强于恶”。我们讨论了这些研究结果对进一步研究和实践的启示。
