The challenging leadership of global virtual teams: The criticality of achieved leadership status for team output

Leaders of global virtual teams face an extra-ordinary amount of challenges compared to collocated team leaders as they have to lead a globally dispersed group across time zones, national borders and cultural boundaries. Scholars have, however, underused social status theory to explain how leaders lead teams to successful project completion. We build on the premise that leader status is endowed by team members at the end of the project, i.e. that it is an achieved, not an ascribed form of status. We draw on thinking related to quasi-experimental designs in our empirical study to examine whether achieved leader status can provide an explanation for successful team deliverables in the context of global virtual teams. Our results are affirmative as we demonstrate that achieved leader status (as perceived by team members) mediates between leadership effectiveness (as evaluated by team members) and team output (as evaluated by an external panel of expert judges). We contend that being an effective leader in the eyes of the team members is not enough. Instead it is global virtual team leaders who endowed with achieved leader status, which we propose is the missing causal link, who lead their teams to successful outcomes.