Transactional Leadership Literature Review

The trend towards a situational leadership in the virtual context has several implications for savvy virtual team leaders. As mentioned before, Kirkman et al. (2002) suggests a leadership style, which is, according to contextual details, oscillating between transactional and transformational leadership. If the main focus is on the coordination challenges, an aspiring leader should focus more on transactional leadership behavior. Setting clearly defined high quality goals and milestones increase each team member’s accountability and consequently decrease coordination problems for the team leader (Pearce & Sims, 2002). In the qualitative communication challenge, leaders have to account for the complexity of virtuality. They have to facilitate

Frequent virtual team meetings with a non-work related section can also improve this relationship building process, which overall ameliorates quantitative virtual team communication. Similarly, such transformational leadership actions can further increase trust and team collaboration, by discouraging team members of social loafing in the anonymity of the virtual context (Harkins & Szymanski, 1989). However, team collaboration can also be enhanced with clear goal settings and corresponding milestone group rewards, which tends to be more transactional leadership actions.

A practical way for leaders to decipher the different challenges that come along with cultural diversity in the virtual

One limitation of this study is that the identified categorization proposals solely emerge from the literature reviewed. It is up for future quantitative research to determine whether for instance the assigned vs. emergent shared leadership paradigm is indeed a prevalent occurrence in virtual teams. Similarly, the dearth of empirical work on the effects of shared leadership on virtual team performance offers tremendous opportunities for future research. Moreover, there is a high amount of interdependencies between different categorizations in this literature review, which may impede lucidity of this paper. First, leadership behaviors within the transformational and transactional leadership category may be similar to each other, due to the fact that they are rather complementary than mutually exclusive styles. Second, shared leadership is not necessarily an opposing construct to transformational and transactional leadership, but under certain circumstances also an antecedent of the former two styles. When an organization incorporates (assigned) shared leadership, the designated team leaders can again exert different leadership styles. In other words, shared leadership style could be an organizational composition, which augments the overall amount of leadership styles in the virtual team. Third, challenges for leadership in the virtual context are highly interdepend. Factors such as anonymity in