Corporate Culture in Virtual Organizations - The Leadership Perspective
Feodorow, Anna (2007)
2007
Kuvaus
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Tiivistelmä
Culture is the glue holding groups, organizations and even whole societies together. Any given group will form a culture and leadership’s role is to help in the cultural development process. In virtual organizations building a congruent culture can be challenging because there is very little human interaction, as we have traditionally known it.
The objective of this study was to find out more about virtual organizations and their corporate cultures. The theoretical framework of this study is built on transactional leadership, transformational leadership and charismatic leadership. Additionally the concept of culture will be introduced thoroughly. The empirical part consists of four case studies conducted by interviewing virtual contact center leaders.
The findings suggest that building a congruent virtual culture is hard. Virtual leadership approaches varied by organization. Two of the organizations were focused on financial incentives. They used self-regulatory call-routing systems, and online forums as their primary management tools. This study classified them as “market cultures” that used transactional leadership approaches. The other organizations were focused on humanistic incentives. They emphasized open communication, mentoring, coaching, and regular feedback systems for their management tools. This study classified them as “adhocracy cultures”, which used transformational leadership approaches.
The surprising finding of this study is that successful virtual organizations must merge these two approaches into one model if they want to achieve market dominance. From the workers perspective, the economic incentives for each organization are equal. If this is true, then culture becomes the dominant factor of market success. It will not be good enough to have either a transactional approach or a transformational approach, which is what exists today. Virtual organizations must be both transactionally efficient and human wise to succeed.
The objective of this study was to find out more about virtual organizations and their corporate cultures. The theoretical framework of this study is built on transactional leadership, transformational leadership and charismatic leadership. Additionally the concept of culture will be introduced thoroughly. The empirical part consists of four case studies conducted by interviewing virtual contact center leaders.
The findings suggest that building a congruent virtual culture is hard. Virtual leadership approaches varied by organization. Two of the organizations were focused on financial incentives. They used self-regulatory call-routing systems, and online forums as their primary management tools. This study classified them as “market cultures” that used transactional leadership approaches. The other organizations were focused on humanistic incentives. They emphasized open communication, mentoring, coaching, and regular feedback systems for their management tools. This study classified them as “adhocracy cultures”, which used transformational leadership approaches.
The surprising finding of this study is that successful virtual organizations must merge these two approaches into one model if they want to achieve market dominance. From the workers perspective, the economic incentives for each organization are equal. If this is true, then culture becomes the dominant factor of market success. It will not be good enough to have either a transactional approach or a transformational approach, which is what exists today. Virtual organizations must be both transactionally efficient and human wise to succeed.
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