6. Chapter 6: Discussion of Results
6.5 Conclusion of Research Question 2
complexity, most participants argued that they experienced shared leadership in their teams. This was characterised by the rotation of leadership roles, involvement and engagement of all team members as well as a lack of hierarchy. Participants D4 and D9 gave examples of team members taking ownership of tasks at hand, even when they were not project leads. Participant D3 added that shared leadership reduced pressure on the team and created excitement to achieve. These examples confirm the assertion by Zhu and Lee (2017), that shared leadership is emergent and is characterised by sharing leadership responsibilities within a team where all team members influence each other to achieve team goals. The experiences of these participants also agree with Hoch (2013) that shared leadership fostered innovation and is characterised by collaborative decision-making and shared responsibility for better outcomes.
Participants D12 and D14 articulated that there needed to be equality within the team in terms of leadership and that the team needed to develop mechanisms to rotate and to distribute leadership influence and roles. The comments about developing mechanisms to rotate leadership roles were in line with Scott-Young et al. (2019), who argued that relationships between team members emerge, co-evolve and change throughout the entire life cycle of the project. Therefore, it was vital and fair for leadership roles and influence to be exchanged among team members in order to increase engagement and improve innovation. Where possible, it was important to share these leadership roles based on knowledge, task expertise and competence, to foster efficient project team functioning. This was succinctly articulated by Participant D4 that “everybody pulled through to try and make a success of this…”.
Choi and Cho (2019) ascertained that complex tasks needed higher levels of trust.
Eisenberg et al. (2016) argued that shared leadership helped meet the need for coordinated efforts, resulting in a natural connection to task complexity in teams, which fosters trust, improves communication and cohesion. Participants also confirmed that trust was important while rotating leadership and dealing with complex tasks. Participant D3 argued that communication was essential to building trust, while Participant D1 added that it took time to build trust. From these experiences one can
D9 added that sharing of tangible work outputs helped to build trust. Therefore, the longer team members worked together and the more they delivered on the required outputs, the more trust was built.
Participants added that building trust was a conscious effort that needed some level of accountability. They also pointed out that there needed to be an environment where team members felt safe to interact and share their input freely. Safe spaces were important as Alsharo et al. (2017) pointed out that trust included vulnerability and team members needed the assurance that they could freely express themselves.
These findings indicate that team members needed to take accountability towards actively looking for opportunities to build trust. This implies that those who did not actively seek such opportunities to build trust may be perceived as unaccountable and opposing the achievement of team goals. This also means that every team member was charged with the accountability to create a safe environment for all team members to interact and share inputs. In order to create this safe environment, participants added that team members needed to foster one-on-one intimate relationships with each other. This was important as Gilson et al. (2015) pointed out that the lack of interpersonal trust resulted in team members not sharing their knowledge with other team members, which would hamper collaboration and team performance. Therefore, it follows that in the absence of trust, communication, collaboration, team cohesion and performance may be negatively impacted.
The findings also indicated that diversity within virtual teams as well as different leaderships styles often resulted in a challenge with reaching consensus. This was consistent with scholars who agreed that reaching consensus in virtual project teams can be a challenge (Peng et al., 2019). Participants D1 and D13 confirmed that reaching consensus was often a challenge. To enhance the opportunities for reaching consensus, Participants D1 and D6 argued that it was important to establish buy-in, a mutual understanding upfront and to lean on democratic principles.
Participant D15 added that sharing a common vision was one of the key elements towards reaching consensus. This was in line with Lechner and Mortlock (2021) who argued that sharing a common goal was critical for virtual project teams. From the findings, it is evident that virtual team members need to be intentional about reaching consensus, they need to share a common goal, establish principles that guide the process of reaching consensus and have a leadership style that understands and supports the process of reaching consensus.
Participants also elaborated on the emergent need for coaching and mentoring. This included instances where external assistance was needed and where members coached each other offline. According to the participants, this needed team members to be open minded to learn and to be influenced. Coaching and mentoring was not within the scope of this research, however, the findings suggest that there is merit in exploring this phenomenon, as evidence is shown that it emerges in virtual project teams. According to Participant D6, evidence of coaching and mentoring was when team members took time to teach each other and exchanged tips on building ICT skills.
According to the participants, empathy was one of the behaviours that demonstrated leadership within virtual project teams. This was in line with Quisenberry (2018), who argued that empathy was highly regarded as a key attribute of leadership and ultimately helped steer projects along. In agreement with these sentiments, Participants D8 and D14 explained that empathy improved communication and collaboration, which in turn improved team collaboration and performance.
Participants D3 and D5 gave practical examples where they were empathetic to one another, wherein if a meeting was scheduled to be on MS Teams, and it happened that one member could not use the platform, the team would swiftly change to another platform in order to accommodate all team members.