Research Archives - Leading Virtually

Should you care that someone’s not reciprocating your friendship?

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 13:22:48 +0000

If I think of you as a friend, then there’s about 50% likelihood that you don’t think of me likewise.

That’s disturbing, isn’t it?

Well, it should be. Good friendship is vital to our physical and emotional health. A Harvard study that spanned more than 75 years concluded that the single most important determinant of our well-being, including financial, is the quality of our relationships, which certainly include our friendships. Even in the workplace, friendship can be a source of happiness and improve our work performance by leading to trusting relationships in which those involved have each other’s back.

What really prompted me to write this article is a recent study that examined reciprocity in friendships and the effect it has on the influence one has over another. Its finding about the existence of reciprocity was quite consistent with what previous studies have also found. Essentially, when those you identify as friends are asked to identify who their friends are, studies indicate that there is only a 34 to 53 percent chance that they would identify you as their friend.

Of course, lack of reciprocity in friendship is not really good news for developing high quality relationships. In the workplace, the lack of reciprocity in friendships can be damaging in a variety of ways. Among those is the limiting of our ability to influence others, which then affects our ability to engage others in collective action and collaborate with them — something that organizations expect us to do more of today.

The lack of reciprocity in friendships may simply be due to the fact that it is not humanly possible to be friends with everyone. Robin Dunbar, a social psychologist, has proposed a limit to the number of stable social relationships one can have: 150. The basis for Dunbar’s number is human cognitive limitations. Technology, with all its information processing prowess, may help us push beyond the limits imposed by our cognitive apparatus but, apparently, not by much. While technology may help us broadcast our life happenings to others and help us stay acquainted with others, research is reasonably clear that technology does little to strengthen our close relationships — those which can be a source of comfort and emotional support as well as amplification of our happiness. We are generally limited to only about 5 such relationships, with our spouse or significant other occupying the most premier position for many of us.

In the office, the lack of reciprocity in friendships may simply be a reflection of what Adam Grant notes to be a trend among Americans to de-emphasize workplace friendships. He attributes this to a variety of reasons including the disappearance of long-term employment with a single employer, the use of flex work hours and remote work, the availability of technology that allows us to be in constant touch with our friends outside work, Protestant beliefs that may encourage greater focus on work, and the more current generations looking at work as means to leisure time after work.

While research suggests that it may be best for you to develop a reciprocated friendship with someone since the influence you have on each other is likely to be the strongest, it is not entirely a lost cause if you see someone as a friend but your friendship is not reciprocated. A study suggests that when the goals or rewards you seek are dependent on the performance of someone who does not reciprocate your friendship, you may still be able to influence that person. Your sense of dependence on someone you see as a friend may make you communicate in a way that ends up influencing that person. For example, you may communicate with kindness and consideration that moves the other person.

So, go ahead and be friendly towards others irrespective of whether your friendship is reciprocated. Be sure to see yourself as dependent on them in some way. This will increase the level of influence you have on them and, at the very least, make you look like a leader in their eyes.

Acknowledgment: I wish to thank Theresa Sigillito Hollema for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post.

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When the Leader is the Only One Remote From the Team

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 20:58:37 +0000

On my LinkedIn profile, I received a suggestion in response to one of my recent posts that I cover a particular configuration of virtual teams. In this configuration, the team leader is in one location and the rest of the team is in another. There is some research on the effects of different configurations or distributions of members of virtual teams but there is none, to the best of my knowledge, on this particular configuration. I have used relevant research to put together some educated estimates of what is likely to happen.

Presence of a faultline

When the leader is the only one remote from the team, a faultline results, which then triggers social categorization on the basis of status or authority. The leader, because of the power and authority that s/he yields, will be seen by the team member as belonging to a different category compared to them. Frequent interaction among team members and lack of such interaction with the leader is likely to make their separation from the leader even more salient and provide opportunities for them to reinforce their separate identity and solidarity with each other. The leader, too, may categorize the rest of the team as those who share a role different from her/his and who are accountable to her/him.

This faultline separating the leader from the rest of the team is made worse by distance. Most or all interaction between the leader and members is now mediated by technology, which tends to restrict what is communicated. Additionally, whatever is communicated may not be shared with the whole team. The leader is not fully aware of the actual circumstances of the rest of the team just like the rest of the team is unaware of the leader’s circumstances (see a related post on the presence of subgroups in virtual teams). Under these conditions, attributions play an important role in how the leader and followers evaluate each other. Individuals have a tendency to generate explanations or make sense of the happenings around them. In a face-to-face setting, one has access to significant levels of direct interaction and observations from which to make sense but such interaction and observations are scarcer in a virtual team and sense-making is likely to be based more on one’s mental models rather than the actual circumstances.

Biased sense-making resulting from the faultline

The problem with this sense-making and the resulting attributions is that they tend to be biased. So, we not only have a clear separation between the leader and the team that lends itself to a us versus her/him or me versus them mentality, but we have each of the parties influenced by systematic biases when trying to make sense of the other. Unless a leader and the rest of the team are aware of these tendencies and guard against those by giving the benefit of the doubt to the other entity, the end result may not always be pleasant.

What are some of the biases that affect the process of making attributions? Two that are commonly cited in the attribution literature are the actor-observer and self-serving biases. These interact with one another to give rise to an interesting tendency. When something goes well, the leader is likely to attribute that to her/his leadership and actions. If something goes wrong, the leader is likely to link that with factors external to her/him. These might be the rest of the team or other factors, such as the time zone difference, if one exists. The team members may be similarly biased to attribute any positive happenings to themselves and negative happenings to external factors, including the leader.

Due to such evaluations by the leader and the rest of the team, lack of trust, not liking or being persuaded by someone on the other side of the faultline, incomplete diagnosis of issues, and conflict are likely. Team performance is likely to suffer. There is research that suggests that when the leader communicates her/his evaluation of the rest of the team’s role in any negative happening, the team members are induced to make the same attribution (of their role) and experience learned helplessness. Research also suggests that there are many factors that moderate how the above tendencies actually play out. Culture is one of the factors. A leader from an individualistic culture is likely to attribute any negative happening to team members rather than to the peculiar set of conditions that may be facing while a leader from a collectivistic culture is more likely to attribute a similar happening to external conditions.

Overcoming problems due to the faultline

But the presence of a faultline caused by a leader’s separation from the rest of the team is not always bad news. Nor is the process of making attributions. A deft leader is likely to make the faultline less salient by breaking down the status difference and giving team members an equal say in the workings of the team. Such a leader is also likely to encourage greater interaction and information sharing so that sense-making is based on actual happenings and circumstances instead of mental models and biases that can lead to erroneous evaluation. A smart leader, in fact, would take advantage of being virtual and shape the attributions of others in a way which leads to her/him being easily seen as transformational and charismatic. In the absence of direct observation of the leader, the leader is in a position to communicate selective information about her/his performance or behaviors that cues the rest of the team to see her/him in a very positive light. Of course, if in actuality the leader is not transformational or charismatic, the leader will eventually be seen as hypocritical and unauthentic.

The above are some general behavioral tendencies that may show up when the leader of a virtual team is the only one remote from the team. There are many other factors that could also influence the actual happenings. Good, frequent, and open communication by the whole team and considerate behavior by all can go a long way in alleviating the ill-effects of the faultline separating the leader from the rest of the team. The leader has to set the example of open and frequent communication, including that oriented towards building social relationships, and considerate behaviors for others to follow.

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How Important Is It To Manage Temporal Diversity in Virtual Teams?

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:44:34 +0000

During the last weekend, I had a chance to observe a couple of workers who were installing new backsplash in my kitchen. One of them was setting the tiles as quickly as he could. It was clear that he wanted to finish his task and get out as quickly as possible. The other went about his work patiently. He took measurements for tiles to be set at the edges, cut the tiles according to measurement, and finally set those tiles. When setting the tiles he had cut, he would look over the work of the first worker and tweak the tiles on the wall in case they were not aligned properly. Occasionally, the first worker would question him about what he was up to and he explained that the alignment of the tiles was not proper and he was fixing it. I remember the first worker telling the second one that it wasn’t a big deal if the tiles were not perfectly aligned. The second worker responded that he felt uneasy if the alignment wasn’t proper. “The quality of what we produce is important to me,” he added.

What I saw in action were two individuals, one who emphasized speed and the other who emphasized quality, somehow balancing their differences in a way that helped them perform effectively as a team. I wondered if this is what happens in a team when team members differ in terms of their emphasis on speed, quality, and other performance goals. Does such diversity help a team address different and, oftentimes, competing team performance expectations that are typical for many teams? Or does it create conflict among workers and hinder team performance? Are there any ways in which this diversity can be managed so that it benefits rather than hinders team performance? Interestingly, these questions were quite similar to those that motivated a recent study reported by Susan Mohammed and Sucheta Nadkarni in the Academy of Management Journal. The authors examined how team temporal diversity can be effectively managed to maximize team performance. Certainly, there is more to diversity within a team than just temporal diversity but what Mohammed and Nadkarni found helped me get closer to the answers I was seeking.

Dimensions of temporal diversity
Mohammed and Nadkarni defined temporal diversity as variations in members’ time urgency, pacing style, and time perspective.

Time urgency is a personality trait that reflects how concerned someone is about conserving time. Time urgent individuals feel that time needs to be conserved. They feel chronically hurried and are continuously focused on how much time is remaining for an activity. On the other hand, those who are not time urgent don’t feel highly constrained by time. They feel less hurried and are not concerned with the passage of time.

Pacing style refers to how individuals pace their effort when working towards deadlines. People vary from those who begin working on their tasks right away (early action individuals) to those who start working close to the deadline (deadline action individuals). In between, you find steady action individuals who spread out their work evenly.

Time perspective reflects the importance given by an individual to past, present, and future time frames. Those with present time perspective tend to focus on immediate pleasure, take more risks, and plan only for the near future whereas those with future time perspective tend to be highly goal-oriented, consider future consequences, and plan beyond the near future.

Temporal diversity can help but you need temporal leadership
Mohammed and Nadkarni viewed temporal diversity as helping a team perform better provided it is managed appropriately. They suggested that one way in which temporal diversity could be managed is via temporal leadership. They defined temporal leadership as the extent to which team leaders scheduled deadlines, synchronized team member behaviors, and allocated temporal resources. According to the authors, strong temporal leadership helps the team reduce the problems associated with temporal diversity and put it to work to meet diverse performance expectations, thereby helping team performance. On the other hand, weak temporal leadership, the authors contended, hinders team performance by failing to curb the problems arising from temporal diversity and being unable to put it to good use.

The results from the study that Mohammed and Nadkarni conducted using 71 teams from a process outsourcing provider firm in India supported the authors’ contention that temporal diversity can help a team perform better if temporal leadership is strong. They found that time urgency and pacing style diversity were more positively related to team performance when temporal leadership was stronger. In other words, teams can benefit from having a mix of high and low time urgency members as well as a mix of those who differ on how they pace their assignments. But to get this benefit, team leaders must set milestones, prioritize tasks, remind members of important deadlines, build time for contingencies, pace the team members, and coordinate team members’ efforts to help the team meet its deadlines. If they don’t, then diversity may harm rather than benefit team performance. Mohammed and Nadkarni did not find diversity in future orientation as playing any role in influencing team performance.

Mohammed and Nadkarni found another interesting result: strong temporal leadership improved team performance, irrespective of whether temporal diversity in the team was high or low.

What does this mean for virtual teams?
Virtual teams, or teams engaged in remote work, often consist of individuals from different cultures. Individuals from different cultures tend to have different visions of time. Americans, for instance, possess a clock vision of time and see time as a scarce commodity which must be conserved. Those belonging to the Hindu or Buddhist culture, on the other hand, adopt a timeless vision of time. They view the world as engaged in simultaneous destruction and creation. In such a view, the passage of time is not important because whatever goes, comes back again. Whatever is happening today will happen again in the future. Such differences among team members are likely to introduce temporal diversity within the team and create an opportunity for enhancing team performance with the help of temporal leadership.

Leaders of teams engaged in remote work can create temporal leadership within a team by helping it develop a team compact and regularly conduct after action reviews (AARs). The development of a team compact helps a virtual team set milestones and prioritize tasks. It helps the virtual team coordinate its efforts — the team assigns clear tasks to its members and creates a schedule for the work due from the members. The team also creates a timetable for team meetings and conducting AARs. During the development of a team compact, members of a virtual team also agree to how soon they will respond to messages from each other. When a virtual team conducts AARs, it gets an opportunity to revisit the team compact and review how it is faring in terms of following its schedule and meeting its milestones and deadlines. During the AARs, the team may also change its schedule or create a contingency plan for the remainder of the project if necessary.The development of the team compact and conducting regular AARs, therefore, give the whole team the opportunity to engage in temporal leadership and manage the temporal diversity that may exist in the team. By letting the whole team engage in temporal leadership rather than imposing a set of task assignments and a delivery schedule on them (as it happens in the case of team charters), team leaders increase the likelihood of team members responding effectively to temporal leadership and working together to improve team performance.

Even though team compact and AARs are useful tools for a team engaged in remote work, they are not always embraced enthusiastically. Mohammed and Nadkarni’s results have provided me with a strong justification for recommending the team compact and AARs to virtual teams. I often get quizzical looks when I recommend these tools to the virtual teams that I supervise. Team members see the development of a team compact and conducting AARs as trivial exercises with little value. They sometimes argue that they are professionals and they don’t need to be reminded regularly that they have to complete their work. What I see missing in these individuals is the realization that they are working in a team and that there are bound to be differences in how each individual approaches the work assigned to that individual. As the study by Mohammed and Nadkarni demonstrates, team members may differ on the basis of time urgency and pacing style. While each team member may approach their individual work professionally, because they have to work with each other, they need to manage their individual differences related to time urgency and pacing style. In fact, by managing their individual differences, they may be able to harness their different traits or styles to benefit team performance. Even if there is no temporal diversity in the virtual team, creating a team compact and conducting regular AARs provide opportunities to the team to engage in temporal leadership and improve team performance.

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Returning to Leading Virtually

Rebecca Jestice — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:26:49 +0000

I have been away from writing for Leading Virtually for a little more than a year. I didn’t intend for my absence to be so long, but it was a very eventful and busy year for me. I am happy to be blogging again for Leading Virtually at the start of this new year! Although I was away from Leading Virtually, I was not away from the realms of leadership and computer mediated communication. I’ll tell you briefly what I was doing the past year and few months.

One thing I was doing was getting married! Leading Virtually readers will be able to relate to my story. I met my husband in Second Life in 2007. He is from Europe and I am from the US. So we developed and grew a relationship using online and mobile tools like Skype and Picassa, and virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft in between our opportunities to visit. After four years I consider myself a veteran of online communication! We look forward to the day these tools are unnecessary, but we are so thankful that we live in a world in which they exist and make our communications easier and instantaneous even across the Atlantic.

The other thing I was doing was finishing my dissertation! I successfully defended my dissertation in November. My dissertation focused on using virtual worlds for education and training. I completed two different studies using two different virtual worlds. I’ll give a brief description here of the two studies and will write subsequent posts with details of each. In the first study, I used the Virtual Forbidden City to look at student learning about the Forbidden City in Beijing. The study had students learn about the Forbidden City using an online PowerPoint presentation as used in a lot of distance education courses as well as taking a virtual field trip to the Forbidden City using the virtual world. The second study focused on using online tools for leadership development. In this study, a comparison was made between using Second Life and WebEx for delivering some basic leadership training materials and activities.

Again, I’ll give more details about the studies and what we found in my next posts. Today I wanted to say happy New Year, and I look forward to writing again and continuing our conversations.

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Is Video Conferencing a Good Substitute for Face-to-face Meetings?

Surinder Kahai — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:53:21 +0000

When air travel to and from several European cities was curtailed due to volcanic ash, people adopted Skype and other video conferencing tools in lieu of travel. Unlike email or telephone, video conferencing is thought to be like face-to-face communication but only somewhat leaner because one is not in the same place as the person one is communicating with. In other words, video conferencing is thought to vary in degree rather than in nature.

Research on video conferencing, however, paints a different picture. It argues that video-conferencing gives rise to a different kind of information processing than what takes place during face-to-face meetings. A case in point is a study by Carlos Ferran and Stephanie Watts, published in September 2008 in Management Science.

According to the researchers, communicators using video conferencing face a higher cognitive load than face-to-face communicators because of a variety of challenges, including those of identifying who is speaking, detecting movement, coordinating eye-contact, turn-taking, and conversation pacing. Video conferencing also consumes greater cognitive attention due to heightened self-awareness. Faced with a higher cognitive load, users of video conferencing may economize when evaluating the information presented the speaker. They may economize by using heuristics, such as how likeable they perceive the speaker to be, rather than the quality of the arguments presented by the speaker when judging whether or not they will adopt or use the information presented by the speaker. On the other hand, in face-to-face meetings, the communication medium does not impose as much cognitive burden, thereby leaving the receiver of any communication with adequate cognitive resources to focus on the quality of information while making judgment about whether or not it will be adopted and used.

Ferran and Watts report results from a field study in which they found support for their model of how video conferencing may differ from face-to-face communication. In a study of medical professionals, they found that participants attending a seminar via video conference were more influenced by the speaker’s likeability than by the quality of the speaker’s arguments, whereas the opposite pattern was true for participants who attended in person. The likeability of a person was based on the extent to what that person was perceived as charismatic, appealing, interesting, and friendly. The researchers also confirmed that differences in cognitive load explained these effects. Based on these findings, the authors argued that video conferencing does not simply approach face-to-face interaction — it changes what we attend to. Essentially, we end up attending more to peripheral cues in the form of a person’s likeability than to systematic or rigorous cues to judge the information we are receiving from that person via video conferencing. A word of caution should be noted about Ferran and Watts’ findngs: they apply to the use of video conferencing in seminar-like settings where participants have not had prior interaction with the presenter.

What do the results from Ferran and Watts mean for a leader? When the leader is having a tough time convincing others about the merits of a proposal but is a likeable person, s/he should use video-conferencing rather than a face-to-face meeting to make her/his case. A leader may also recruit a likeable person to present the proposal. Or, if a virtual team is using video-conferencing and the leader would like participants to be more systematic in their processing, the leader should minimize the cognitive burden of using video conferencing. This can be done by giving the users enough training on the use of video conferencing. Moreover, the users should do a dry run with each other so that they become more familiar with each other’s turn-taking pauses, pacing gestures, and other ways of regulating the communication.

Another thing a virtual team leader who can do to increase the attention to logical aspects of the information being presented is to make it easy for participants to focus on logical aspects. Having another window (in addition to the one showing a video of the presenter) that allows users to see a running slide presentation, with arguments laid out very clearly, might be helpful.

In summary, the evidence presented by Ferran and Watts suggests that video conferencing may not be comparable to face-to-face meetings because it changes the nature of information processing by its users. In that sense, it does not substitute for face-to-face meetings. Consequently, simply thinking that video conferencing can be made to approach face-to-face meetings by improving the picture quality may not suffice. One needs to focus on reducing the cognitive burden imposed by video conferencing in order to make it approach face-to-face meetings.

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Does Online Identity Matter In Virtual Teams?

Rebecca Jestice — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:23:12 +0000

I just returned from the Academy of Management conference in Chicago where I presented a paper that Surinder and I wrote with Professor Rui Huang. Our paper was an extension of the research we have been doing on leadership in virtual worlds that I wrote about previously. This paper focused on how one’s online identity may affect virtual team member perceptions and how virtual teams work together. Specifically, we looked at how one’s online identity affects perceptions of anonymity within the team and how that sense of anonymity affects group cohesion and satisfaction. We find this topic to be interesting and timely as organizations begin to use more online media for collaboration and communication. Organizations have to decide how much and if they are going to set rules or guidelines for how employees present themselves, especially as options for expression expand to the creation of avatars in virtual worlds.

For this study, we had student groups, who did not know the other members in their team, perform a decision making task in either Second Life or instant messaging chat rooms. Intuitively one might guess that people in Second Life would be able to and inclined to create an avatar that closely represents how they are in the real world. In instant messaging, I can only create a user name to project to the other group members, but in Second Life I can manipulate physical attributes of my avatar in order to project myself. However, research has shown that in spaces such as massive multiplayer online games, users will create identities for themselves that are more like their ideal self, or how they imagine their more perfect selves (see this article, e.g.), than identities that reflect how they really are. So, we hypothesized that people in Second Life would actually perceive their online identity in the virtual world as less like their real identity than people in instant messaging. We also hypothesized that if users perceived their online identity to be similar to their real identity, then they would feel that they are able to project who they really are more easily to the group and others can recognize them more easily in the group. In other words, those who had an online identity further from their real identity would perceive themselves as being more anonymous to the other members of their group. Additionally, we expected that when team members perceive themselves as more anonymous to other members in their group, it would be more difficult to build relationships with others and group work will be less satisfying.

Our results indicate that online identities of IM users were perceived to be closer to users’ real identities than online identities of SL users. The more the online identity was perceived as close to one’s real identity, the lower was perceived anonymity of oneself and others. We also found that higher levels of perceived anonymity led to lower levels of perceived cooperation, group cohesion, and satisfaction within the groups. In other words, how closely one’s online identity resembles one’s real identity can influence how team members experience virtual team processes and outcomes in decision-making tasks. The features available for creating one’s identity in a given medium can influence how one creates one’s online identity and how close that identity might resemble one’s real identity. The more choices that are available, the more likely a user is to create an identity that is less like their real self.

Although this is a first step in understanding the role of online identity in group processes in virtual teams, some initial recommendations can be drawn from the study results. These ideas are based on the assumption that the virtual team or collaborators do not know each other well and do not have opportunities to meet face-to-face.

Organizations may want to consider making guidelines in virtual worlds for how much one’s avatar should differ from how one looks in the real world, especially for teams in which the members do not know each other well yet or are not able to meet face-to-face, but must collaborate to finish a task. This may also apply to meeting clients or customers in a virtual world when there is not an established relationship, although this still needs to be tested. If given too much latitude in the creation of online identities in the virtual world, the results could be a lack of group cohesion, trust and satisfaction.
If business is being conducted in a public virtual world such as Second Life, organizations may want to have employees create one identity, close to their real identity, for their work-related interactions and a separate one for using the virtual world for entertainment.
Organizations that are creating their own virtual world platform may want to carefully consider the features available for creating online identities. More features may lead to the creation of online identities further from users’ real identities which might negatively impact team outcomes. Or, if given many features for online identity creation, organizations may want to also provide guidelines to employees.
Team leaders that are bringing virtual teams together may want to consider which medium to use for team meetings and tasks. For teams that are meeting for a short period of time, or that have to work together to solve a problem, fewer available features for manipulating online identity may enhance the ability of the team to feel cohesion in the group.

If you have used a virtual world for collaboration, we would love to hear your experiences and perceptions regarding the impact of identity on your team or work.

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Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap in Leadership

Surinder Kahai — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:18:01 +0000

The June 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review contained a brief note by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman titled “10 Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders“. The authors, who analyzed 360-degree feedback, identified the following 10 most common shortcomings of ineffective leaders. The worst leaders:

Lacked energy and enthusiasm;
Accepted their own mediocre performance;
Lacked clear vision and direction;
Had poor judgment;
Did not collaborate;
Did not walk the talk;
Resisted new ideas;
Did not learn from mistakes;
Lacked interpersonal skills; and
Failed to develop others.

The list sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Zenger and Folkman admit that the flaws seem obvious ones that any leader would try to fix. But they found that ineffective leaders were often unaware of their flaws. The authors suggest that leaders need to take a hard look at themselves and should seek candid feedback on their performance. I believe that simple awareness of what constitutes effective leadership behaviors and how one is performing on them may not be adequate for improvement. In this article, I suggest an intervention that might work for you.

Specifically, I focus on the following:

The knowing-doing gap;
Closing the knowing-doing gap;
Goal-setting as a simple intervention;
The power of goal-setting;
Preventing relapse with email reminders to yourself; and
Concluding remarks.

The knowing-doing gap
There is often a big gap between knowledge of something and translating that knowledge into action. This is the classic knowing-doing gap. We often read something or attend training sessions and resolve to change our behavior but quite often there is little action and we lapse into our old behaviors. This relapse is often caused by time pressures, peer pressure, anxiety over one’s capabilities, and, sometimes, by joyful circumstances (e.g., feelings that things are going well).

Closing the knowing-doing gap
A field of research has emerged to address the training transfer issue. It focuses on finding ways to enable positive transfer of concepts from training to action and prevent relapse to old behaviors. This field provides many suggestions that focus on trainee characteristics, training design, and the work environment to improve training transfer. I am going to focus on something that is under the control of an individual interested in changing her/his leadership behaviors.

Specifically, my goal is to suggest an intervention that can be used by someone who has either acquired new leadership knowledge from a book or undergone some sort of leadership training to bring about a change in her/his leadership behaviors. This intervention should apply equally well to someone who is leading a virtual team or a traditional team. Moreover, I expect this intervention to apply equally well to leadership knowledge or tips acquired from different sources. As long as one is trying to apply behaviorally oriented leadership knowledge or tips, the following intervention should work.

Goal-setting as a simple intervention
A simple intervention that research has shown to work is goal setting (see an example of such research that appeared in the Academy of Management Journal). Goal setting involves creating a list of desirable leadership behaviors, setting targets for those behaviors (e.g., 5 times per week), and monitoring progress towards achieving those targets. When creating a list of desirable behaviors, make sure that the behaviors are specific, actionable behaviors rather than general behaviors. For instance, corresponding to the general behavior of showing energy and enthusiasm, some specific behaviors would be to ‘show willingness to take on additional responsibilities,’ ‘come in early to work,’ or ‘finish the work assigned to me before others remind me to.’ You will have to consider your unique situation to translate the desirable leadership behaviors into specific actions.

You will find it useful to share your list and targets with someone you trust (e.g., your peer or superior). Such sharing builds public commitment to your goals. To strengthen this commitment, also consider sharing how well you are achieving your targets with them.

How do you set targets? During the first week or two, monitor opportunities for displaying desirable behaviors. Make a note of their frequencies. As a first pass, the frequencies of opportunities you experience could be used as targets.You don’t have to get your targets right the first time. Give yourself the latitude to adjust the targets to make sure that you don’t exhaust yourself and have the energy to perform well.

The power of goal-setting
The power of goal setting has also been shown in areas other than management. A recent Wired magazine article discusses the use of goal setting in the Nike+ system. This system combines the sensor in a runner’s Nike shoe with an iPod and allows the runner to enter the target for a run and track her/his performance. The runner’s goal and performance data is then uploaded to NikePlus.com, which adds the current information to the history of all of the runner’s runs. According to the article, analysis of this data has revealed that “If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they’re massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they’ve gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.”

I believe the Nike+ story has an important implication for someone trying to change one’s leadership behavior: be patient, especially with yourself. Don’t give up in face of the effort that may be required upfront. Once you taste some success, it will feed on itself to motivate you even more to change your behavior.

Preventing relapse with email reminders to yourself
There is always a danger of relapse to one’s old behaviors. Researchers and practitioners often suggest an elaborate relapse prevention program focusing on relapse awareness, identification of situations that may cause relapse, and development of coping responses (see example). While such a program can be effective, especially when combined with goal-setting, I suggest that you first try something simpler: set up an email alert system reminding you of the most important goals you have set for yourself as part of the goal-setting intervention. One way to do that would be to set up weekly or twice-weekly events on Google Calendar with email reminders sent to you just prior to those events. It is possible for you to set up Google calendar events in such a way that the reminders alert you about your most critical goals.

The efficacy of reminder emails in changing people’s behaviors was demonstrated in a recently published study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. As part of this study, individuals signed up for a 16-week, individually tailored e-mail program to improve their health-related behaviors. When these individuals received weekly email reminders that alerted them about their goals (e.g., go for a walk during a coffee break), they were more likely to engage in healthy behaviors than individuals in the control group who did not sign up for the program. For a simple description of this study, read this Time Magazine article.

Concluding remarks
We are often inspired by a leadership book, article, or training program to change our leadership behaviors. But we find it challenging to translate our inspiration into change in behaviors. We all face this challenge. I have outlined a set of steps that you could take to close the knowing-doing gap and be a more effective leader.

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What’s More Effective? Carrot or Stick?

Surinder Kahai — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:59:25 +0000

Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal carried an article by Safeway’s CEO, Steven A. Burd, addressing the national health-care reform debate. Safeway has been able to hold the per-capita health-care costs flat since 2005, while for most American companies these costs have increased by 38% during the same period. Mr. Burd attributed this to a program that Safeway designed in 2005 to reward healthy behavior.

In this post, I focus on the following:

The use of contingent rewards at Safeway.
Carrot or stick? Does it make a difference?
What does research say about rewards and punishment?
Does rewarding or punishing individuals make a difference at the team level?
What does it mean for virtual teams?

The use of contingent rewards at Safeway
The Safeway program emerged out of a realization that about 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior and, therefore, preventable. Another realization was that cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity cases constitute 74% of all health-care costs and majority of these cases are preventable. To motivate healthy behaviors, Safeway instituted discounts in health-care premiums and tied these discounts to tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels.The discounts have helped Safeway build personal accountability for health among its employees. This accountability has created a culture of health and fitness within Safeway. According to Mr. Burd, Safeway’s obesity and smoking rates are roughly 70% of the national average. Employees have reported better health as a result of the program and are asking for more rewards.

What caught my attention in the Safeway article was that contingent rewards were used to bring about change in people’s behaviors. Employees are tested for tobacco usage, weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels and receive discounts off a “base level” premium for each test they pass. So rather than punishing employees who don’t take care of their health by adding to their premiums, Safeway rewards those who pass the health tests by providing them with discounts.

Carrot or Stick? Does it make a difference?
Does it make a difference in the ultimate behavior shown by people when we reward good behavior or punish bad behavior? If my teenage children provide any indication of how others would respond, it seems that rewards would be more powerful than punishment. As a scientist, however, I wanted more robust evidence, for which I turned to past research.

There is a fair amount of research on this topic. I focused on research about rewarding and punishing behaviors by leaders. There were two notable studies by Philip Podsakoff and his colleagues that I found extremely useful. One of them examined the effects of a leader’s reward and punishment behaviors on group processes and productivity and the other reported an analysis of several studies on this topic.

What does research say about rewards and punishment?
The general finding is that both leader reward and punishment behaviors have a significant relationship with a variety of employee attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. Contingent rewards, or rewards that are contingent upon appropriate task behaviors, reduce role ambiguity and improve employee satisfaction, effort, conscientiousness and performance, among other things. The rewards may be in the form of merit increases, bonuses, praise, commendations, and social approval. Contingent punishment, or punishment that is contingent on the absence of appropriate task behaviors, too reduces role ambiguity and increases employee satisfaction, although to a smaller extent than contingent rewards. Additionally, contingent punishment reduces employee conscientiousness and performance. Punishment may take the form of negative feedback, low or no merit increase, withholding of commission, dismissal, and social disapproval. These results suggest that contingent rewards are superior to contingent punishment.

Part of the superiority of contingent rewards stems from the fact that for contingent rewards to work, a leader needs to clarify behaviors that would lead to superior performance and, hence, rewards. This clarity enables the “appropriate” behaviors. On the other hand, contingent punishment simply signals what is undesirable but does not clearly indicate the effective behaviors that the leader expects from the employee.

Does rewarding or punishing individuals make a difference at the team level?
What I found interesting in the papers is that when a leader displays reward and punishment behaviors with individual members in a group, the group’s processes and performance are also affected. Contingent reward behavior has been found to promote group drive, cohesiveness, and productivity. Contingent punishment behaviors also have been found to be beneficial by promoting group drive and productivity but their effects are weaker than those of contingent reward behaviors.

It is hypothesized that the effects of contingent reward or punishment behavior on group drive, cohesion, and performance may be occurring, in part, due to positive effects on individual worker attitudes and performance, as indicated above. The effects on the group may also be occurring due to most members seeing that the leader is equitable and seeks to improve the performance of everyone in the group. These members may themselves encourage poorly performing members to straighten up. It could also be argued that when a leader employs contingent punishment, the leader may not only be identifying unproductive behavior for the individual receiving the punishment but also for other group members, who then attempt to avoid such behavior.

What does it mean for virtual teams?
What research seems to suggest is that virtual team leaders would benefit from clarifying role and task expectations to team members and rewarding team members on the basis of their performance. While research suggests contingent punishment could also have beneficial effects, leaders would help their teams more by focusing on contingent rewards. Leaders should also note that if they simply reward performance but don’t take the time to clarify role and task expectations, the rewards will most probably lose their efficacy. Since members of a virtual team may not have enough opportunities to share their experiences with one another and, therefore, learn from each other about their leader’s rewarding behaviors, leaders may want to make sure that the whole team is aware of their rewarding behaviors.

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Can Being Virtual Benefit A Leader?

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:48:56 +0000

Since virtual teams are supported by technology and technology tends to filter out vital nonverbal cues, can a leader be effective in virtual contexts? This is one of the questions that I have tried to answer in my past research. I have found that leadership can indeed make a positive difference in virtual contexts. I have also found that certain technology features, such as anonymity, can make the effects of certain types of leadership more powerful in virtual contexts. More recent research adds to these results and shows that when a team leader displays transformational leadership behaviors, the effects of these behaviors are more powerful in virtual teams than in face-to-face or same-place teams.

In this post, I cover the following:

What is transformational leadership?
Recent findings about the effects of transformational leadership in virtual teams.
What do the findings mean?
Can you become a transformational leader?

What is transformational leadership?
Transformational leaders influence their followers by transforming the basis of their motivation. Transformational leaders motivate others by engaging their intrinsic interests (e.g., being associated with a particular cause) as opposed to engaging their extrinsic interests (e.g., salary or pay) (see Betsy’s post on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation). Specifically, such leaders employ four different types of behaviors or 4I’s to influence others: inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, and idealized influence. Inspirational motivation involves articulating an exciting and compelling vision to followers as well as highlighting team identity and teamwork. Intellectual stimulation involves challenging assumptions and helping followers re-frame old issues in new and creative ways. As part of individualized consideration, a transformational leader pays attention to the situations and needs of individual followers and helps them develop. Idealized influence involves modeling the behaviors that a transformational leader expects the followers to carry out.

Recent findings
During the last few months, a couple of papers focusing on transformational leadership in virtual teams have appeared in well-respected journals. One of them, by Aparna Joshi, Mila Lazarova, & Hui Liao, found that inspirational leadership (a combination of inspirational motivation and idealized influence) promoted team members’ trust in others (within their team) and their commitment to the team. Additionally, this effect of inspirational leadership became stronger the more dispersed the members of the team were. In other words, inspirational leadership had a more profound effect on trust and commitment in a team whose members were highly dispersed than in a team whose members were in close proximity to each other.

The second paper, by Radostina Purvanova and Joyce Bono, found that the effect of transformational leadership on team performance was stronger in virtual than in face-to-face teams. The authors studied the effects of same leaders in both virtual and face-to-face settings, thereby controlling for differences in effects that could be attributed to inherent qualities of individual leaders rather than their behaviors.

What do the findings mean?
The findings reported by the above papers fly in the face of those who think that technology and distance make it challenging for a leader to motivate others and enable teamwork. With the right kind of leadership, a leader should be able to influence team members even more strongly in a virtual context than in a face-to-face context. Part of this ‘right kind of leadership’ is transformational leadership.

A variety of reasons have been offered to suggest why transformational leadership has a more powerful effective in a virtual rather than a face-to-face team. One of the reasons has to do with the virtual context hiding individual differences among team members and enabling a transformational leader to increase the focus on team identity. Essentially, since members of a virtual team don’t have visual information about other team members, they pay less attention to individual identities and become more sensitive and responsive to team identity cues provided by the transformational leader (see an earlier post in which I have discussed this at length). In such a context, team members work for the good of the team and engage in greater levels of teamwork.

Can you become a transformational leader?
My own experience with coaching virtual team leaders as well as formal evaluations of training programs have shown that it is possible to train leaders to be transformational. Along with my colleagues, I have prepared an online training program designed to help virtual team leaders be more transformational and improve the performance in their teams. This training program is comprehensive in that in also helps virtual team leaders display not only transformational behaviors but also other behaviors that research has shown to be critical for improving virtual team performance. I plan to release the training program on this site in the near future. In case you are interested in learning more about it, please feel free to contact me – use the following template to construct my email address: myfirstname@leadingvirtuallydotcom.

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Focusing on the Positive for Positive Team Outcomes

Rebecca Jestice — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:30:33 +0000

The other day I found a link to a book review on Twitter. The book is called Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. It provides summaries of research about persuasion and how to be successfully persuasive. One study in particular had me thinking about an approach to change and innovation that I am very interested in. The summarized study concluded that ads that quoted negative behavior en masse reinforced the negative behavior in individuals. In the study, visitors to a national park were exposed to two different signs. The first sign stated that large amounts of petrified forest had been previously taken away and to please not remove any pieces. The second sign simply said that visitors should not remove pieces of the forest. The first sign tripled the amount of theft because it portrayed the theft as a common occurrence. The same effect was realized when an ad targeting women voters mentioned the number of women who didn’t vote previously. The attention given to the negative behavior reinforces that it is socially acceptable and increases the occurrence of the behavior.

I found this to be an interesting insight for leaders to think about, especially when faced with the need to make a team intervention, work with a continually evolving team, or introduce change into a team. I was reminded of an approach to change called Appreciative Inquiry. In the simplest of terms, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approaches change from a positive standpoint. Rather than looking for what is not working, AI encourages those involved to think about what is working and how to intensify that effect. The AI approach seeks to bring out the best in people and their organizations. (For more in-depth information about AI, see the Appreciative Inquiry Commons.) Perhaps an AI approach to virtual team leadership could help minimize negative behaviors in a team that is having or facing difficulty by focusing on positive interactions and outcomes and reinforcing them, rather than pointing out trends of negative behaviors. This may be an especially useful method in virtual teams in which people don’t know each other well or depend heavily on technology that can obfuscate meaning of complex messages (such as using email to send sensitive or ambiguous information). Basing interaction in an AI framework for tasks such as an after action review may relieve some defensive reactions in team members when something doesn’t go according to plan and strengthen team unity through concentrating on what went right.

I’d love to know if anyone has experience using AI in teams or organizations and lessons learned from the experience.

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