Leadership is one of the most studied topics in organizational psychology. Thousands of articles and books have weighed in on what traits and behaviors are correlated with good and bad leaders (and under what types of situations), what type of training improves leadership skills, and how subordinates respond to leader behaviors. Indeed, we know quite a bit about the traits and behaviors associated with leadership effectiveness, how traits interact with situations, and how to develop leaders (Chemers, 2000).
Leadership seminars, coaching, and development programs are consulting staples, and leadership development is a recruiting tool for many colleges and universities. Yet most of the research and programs on leadership involve leadership in traditional settings—where a single person assumes responsibility for a co-located group of people. However, globalization and technology are creating work arrangements in which geographically dispersed people exchange information and communicate with each other electronically. In such settings, traditional approaches to leadership may prove inadequate. Although research focused on distributed work has increased in recent years, few studies have been devoted to the concept of leading at a distance. Distance leadership, however, is very much a reality today and is a promising area in need of research. Leadership at a Distance: Research in Technologically Supported Work, edited by Suzanne Weisband, helps to fill this void.
The objectives of the book are to address the complexity involved in studying leadership at a distance and to set new directions in its research. Contributors to this book are from psychology, organizational behavior, information systems, computer science, human–computer interaction, cognitive science, and management. Most of the chapters present empirical studies; although they will be most useful to leadership researchers, professionals and managers—particularly those working in distributed collaborations—will also find helpful ideas.
The book is divided into five sections. The first section examines new challenges for leading at a distance. The second section includes field studies on communication and coordination patterns of employees working at a distance, and the third looks at group processes and group dynamics. The fourth section examines leadership in large online communities; in the last section Weisband discusses significant points from previous chapters, drawing lessons from them, and suggests new research directions.
The studies in this book illustrate some unique features of distributed groups. The lack of formal leaders and the conditions under which leaders may emerge are important considerations (thus, organizations would do well to recruit group members with potential distributed leadership qualifications as well as promote environments for effective distributed leadership emergence). Leaders, too, need to understand how distributed groups work and what aspects play a key role in their functioning. For instance, while communication is important in any interaction, it is even more crucial when group members are dispersed. Several of the studies highlight the importance of communication and the role it plays in the success of distributed groups.
Although the book acknowledges the role of technology in distance leadership, the focus is less on technology itself and more on the role it plays in creating new forms of leadership. This point is effectively brought out in the studies, which also provide a good description of the different types of technology that can be employed successfully in distributed projects. The technologies include e-mail, teleconferencing, group support systems, chat software, web sites, web forums, and highly sophisticated equipment designed for and used by physicians attending trauma patients. How these technologies facilitate or hinder communication and interpersonal interaction, affect leadership styles, and create the need for new types of leadership to emerge is examined effectively throughout the book.
The grouping of chapters into field studies, experiments, and large-scale collaborations makes the book flow smoothly, and the efficient arrangement of chapters makes it an easy read. The studies chosen represent a diverse range of research settings, fields, and methods. The participants in the studies range from professionals and managers to physicians, university students, and laypersons involved in online collaborations. The leader's role is discussed in a variety of aspects—communication, coordination, trust, cohesion, interpersonal interaction, nature of task, leadership style, cultural orientation, authority structure, motivation, group process, and group outcomes.
Thus, the coverage of research settings, samples, and leadership issues is broad and current. Some of the studies' results on popular research areas such as communication, cohesion, trust, group process, and comparisons with face-to-face groups substantiate findings reported by others on distributed groups (see Martins, Gilson, & Maynard, 2004; Warkentin, Sayeed, & Hightower, 1997). The studies devoted to leadership styles and leadership emergence are a good inclusion and will likely kindle an interest in areas so far neglected in distributed group research.
Of particular note are the studies examining large-scale collaboration efforts in online groups. These studies corroborate the book's claim that distance leadership research is moving in new directions. With easy access to electronic communication, more and more people are going online to create and maintain social and professional relationships as well as offer help and support in times of disasters and crises. Obviously, someone must take the initiative to create and maintain an online community, and perform important functions of control, encouragement, and promotion in order to sustain these groups. The studies devoted to leadership in online communities do a good job of examining motivations of online leaders and the challenges involved in maintaining and sustaining online groups.
Weisband provides a good summary in the last chapter, succinctly rounding off the book and highlighting important leadership issues. However, although she offers some sound research suggestions, Weisband limits these suggestions to research questions that are simply extensions to the questions investigated in the book. If distance leadership research is to move in new directions, areas not covered by the studies in the book also need to be explored. For instance, an important characteristic of distributed groups is the diversity of participants in terms of a variety of factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, personality, culture, knowledge, skills, and attitudes. How these variables affect and are, in turn, affected by distributed leadership would be worth investigating. Also, there is a dearth of cross-cultural studies in distributed group research, and as the book makes it a point to discuss leadership challenges in international organizations, a call for more cross-cultural research would not be amiss.
It would also have been nice to have a more comprehensive discussion of methodological issues with regard to future research. Not all the preceding chapters discuss the methodological limitations of their studies, and some of them gloss over these concerns. A particular concern is the external validity of several of the studies. Some of the samples studied were either small in size or restricted to specific populations. Because one of the aims is to further the cause of distance leadership research, a call for more generalizable samples and better methodological rigor is warranted.
The chapters lack an overall theoretical framework. What we have are a number of interesting studies and findings, but we have no overall psychological or systems perspective from which to make sense of them. To be fair, this is perhaps more a function of the state of the field than an omission from the editor or chapter authors. In addition, little mention is made of human nature, particularly evolved human nature, and how our nature may or may not be compatible with many of the evolutionarily novel aspects of leading at a distance.
For example, extrapolating from research on hunter-gatherers and on our other primate cousins (Boehm, 1999; deWaal, 2000), leadership and dominance within co-occurring, face-to-face groups have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, are most likely evolved human universals, and are partially a function of hard-wired psychological mechanisms (Colarelli, Spranger, & Hechanova, 2006). Since leadership and dominance evolved in face-to-face groups, it is unlikely that leadership-related mechanisms—motivation to lead, reactions to leaders and leadership attempts, and so forth—will operate in the same manner in distributed groups.
From this perspective, a number of interesting questions can be raised. We know, for example, that people respond to physical features of leaders (or of people trying to be leaders) and that this is probably due to evolved perceptual mechanisms. What might we expect to happen when people are in distributed groups where there are no physical cues available? Male primates, including humans, are often motivated to seek leadership positions because those positions afford greater status and access to material and sexual resources. Would the same motivators be available in distributed groups?
As the anemic results of the “distance learning” enterprise illustrate (Bower, 2001; Zielinski, 2000), human responses to communication are an interactive function of content and media (Webster & Hackley, 1997). Too often, our enthusiasm for new technology leads us to ask how we can use this technology to take over and more efficiently perform functions that had been previously accomplished through traditional modes of interaction and communication. However, it may be more beneficial to ask different questions: Under what circumstances are the new communication technologies useful, and under what circumstances would we be better off sticking with modalities that are part and parcel of our evolved human nature (Colarelli, 2003)? For example, high-tech, learning-to-read software is not as effective as the tried-and-true method of a parent sitting down and reading to and with his or her child (Bus, van Ijzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995; McKenna, 1998).
Despite some shortcomings, this is an important and thought-provoking book. Clearly, the distributed workplace is here, and this book should be on the shelf of anyone interested in questions about leadership in the new workplace. It is also an appropriate and useful book for graduate students of industrial/organizational psychology, social psychology, organizational behavior, management, and computer science. Its broad perspective, interdisciplinary scope, and diverse research settings will pique the interest of its intended audience and should also spark additional research on leadership at a distance.
