Michael B. Knight

Enhancing Virtual Learning Team Performance: A Leadership Perspective

Debate abounds over whether the virtual team is an effective substitute for the traditional F2F team and can sustain itself. Drawing upon literature on leadership, trust, computer-mediated communication, and teams, we propose a theoretical model of online learning team effectiveness. A quasi-experiment was conducted to empirically test the impact of trust, trust propensity, leadership effectiveness, and communication frequency on virtual learning team satisfaction and performance. The results of PLS support the majority of our hypotheses. Trust serves a mediating role in the relationship between leadership effectiveness and team satisfaction and performance. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed at the end of the paper.

Introduction to Organizational and Social Dynamics in Information Technology Minitrack

This track addresses social issues related to information technology. Social issues are those research topics most aligned with the human factor in terms of information systems planning, development and utilization. The minitrack contains the following paper topic areas and addresses key topic areas related to (1) trust, (2) relationships, (3) human interaction, (4) diversity and culture in the IT workforce, among other social and IT issues.