Structuring leadership: Emergent states and outcomes in multicultural virtual teams

This study investigates the impact of perceived leadership structure (formal leader, informal leader, or no leader) on team outcomes within temporary, self-directed, multicultural virtual teams (MVTs). Addressing recent calls for conceptual precision in team dynamics, we explicitly conceptualize motivation and team identification as cognitive and affective emergent states rather than active team processes. Drawing on adaptive structuration theory, we propose that perceived leadership structure influences team outcomes both directly and indirectly through these emergent states. Our study employed secondary data from a large-scale international virtual collaboration project, capturing multi-source information over 9 weeks from 3526 individuals across 37 countries. This comprehensive dataset provides a uniquely diverse environment for observing temporary MVTs. A multilevel path analysis was employed to test the hypotheses, accounting for individual-level data nested within teams. Our findings challenge the universally positive assumptions surrounding informal/shared leadership. We demonstrate that in short-term MVTs, attempting informal/shared leadership incurs severe coordination costs that hinder performance. Instead, establishing clear structural leadership, whether through an appointed formal leader or complete autonomy of ‘no leadership’, is significantly more adaptive and positively related to motivation, team identification, and satisfaction. Furthermore, we distinguish the differential mediating pathways of the two emergent states. While motivation acts as a robust, central mediator driving both individual satisfaction and team performance, team identification strictly mediates member satisfaction. This study contributes to the literature by shifting the analytical focus to the foundational role of leadership structures in extreme contexts. It also provides actionable human resource management strategies for organizing temporary MVTs.