Building Collective Awareness in Virtual Teams

This chapter investigates the role of e-leaders in building and maintaining collective awareness within virtual teams. The authors examine the effects of behavioral leadership orientation on collective awareness building. The study explores the bi-dimensional structure of both collective awareness and leader behavior orientation. According to this conceptualization, activity-awareness is linked to task-oriented behaviors of e-leaders. Activities related to goal clarification, coordination and work monitoring are expected to provide more visibility regarding team members’ actions and their contribution to work completion. At the same time, social awareness is developed through the e-leaders’ relation-oriented behaviors. The development of aspects related to interpersonal relationships such as trust, cohesion, and conflict management reduce uncertainty regarding the behavior of team members. Interviews conducted with 12 members of two virtual teams confirm the authors’ theoretical development and emphasize information management as a key managerial practice for e-leaders to build collective awareness.