CAREER: Leadership for Virtual Organizational Effectiveness

该项目将产生对虚拟组织领导力的具体理解，以服务于发展现代组织的领导力。该项目将创新的和可能具有变革意义的领导力理论作为一个多层次的汇编过程进行评估，根据该过程，“领导力”由共同履行所需系统职能的多个个人的模式化互动组成。三个实验验证了该领导力模型的核心思想，并开发了领导力评估和项目评估工具。这些实验操纵领导力的配置，并观察这样做对集体的新兴结构以及这些集体的过程、状态和表现的影响。对领导力的科学研究早就认识到，领导者的行为可以对包括团队、单位和组织在内的集体产生非同寻常的影响。虽然许多关于领导力的实证研究侧重于预测存在于单个分析单位的结果(例如，工作满意度、工作绩效)，但许多领导者可能最关键的情况需要复杂的集体互动(例如，协调、信息共享)。灾难应对、疫苗研发和省级重建是需要大规模集体行动的目标的例子，因此需要领导人在这些集体内部协调努力。我们不仅需要了解领导者如何塑造集体，还需要了解他们如何塑造松散耦合的虚拟集体或多团队系统：大型相互依赖的团队通过虚拟工具进行互动，这些虚拟工具相互依存，以实现至少一个共同目标。该项目将为更好地管理这类领域提供实际的见解。

This project will generate a concrete understanding of leadership in virtual organizations in the service of developing leadership capacity in modern organizations. The project evaluates an innovative and potentially transformative theory of leadership as a compilational multilevel process whereby "leadership" is comprised of the patterned interactions of multiple individuals collectively carrying out needed system functions. Three experiments test the core ideas of this leadership model, and develop tools for leadership assessment and program evaluation. These experiments manipulate configurations of leadership and observe the effects of doing so on the emergent structure of the collective, as well as the processes, states, and performance of these collectives. The scientific study of leadership has long recognized that the behavior of leaders can have extraordinary effects on collectives including teams, units, and organizations. While much of the empirical research on leadership focuses on predicting outcomes that reside at the individual unit of analysis (e.g., job satisfaction, work performance), many of the situations where leaders are potentially most pivotal require complex collective interactions (e.g., coordination, information sharing). Disaster response, vaccine development, and provincial reconstruction are examples of goals that require action by large-scale collectives, and so require leaders to orchestrate the effort within those collectives. Not only do we need to understand how leaders shape collectives, but we need to understand how they shape loosely coupled virtual collectives or multiteam systems: large interdependent teams interacting through virtual tools, which are interdependent with one another in order to achieve at least one common goal. This project will yield practical insights for better management in these sorts of domains.