Impact of Leadership Styles on Team Effectiveness and Performance

Table of Contents

Table of Figures

Table of Abbreviations

1 Introduction
1.1 Research Problem
1.2 Research Questions
1.3 Research Design
1.4 Structure of the Thesis

2 Hypothesis and Methodologies

3 Literature Review
3.1 Engineering Multinational Virtual Team (EMVT)
3.1.1 What is a Multinational Virtual Team (MVT)
3.1.2 Characteristics of MVT
3.1.3 Uniqueness and challenges of EMVT
3.1.4 Team Dynamics in EMVTs
3.1.5 Conflicts in EMVT
3.2 Leadership Styles
3.2.1 Overview of Leadership Theories
3.2.2 Transformational Leadership Style
3.2.3 Transactional Leadership Style
3.2.4 Laissez-Faire / Passive Avoidant Leadership Style
3.2.5 Comparison of Leadership Styles
3.3 Team Performance
3.3.1 Definition and Importance of Team Performance
3.3.2 Team Performance Models and Measurement

4 Empirical Study
4.1 Research Setting and Framework
4.1.1 Research Environment
4.1.2 Research Design
4.2 Data Analysis
4.2.1 General Overview
4.2.2 Descriptive Statistics
4.2.3 Reliability Statistics
4.2.4 Inferential Statistics
4.3 Main Findings

5 Conclusion and Limitations
5.1 Conclusion
5.2 Managerial Implications
5.3 Research Limitations
5.4 Future Research

6 Appendix I: Research Questionnaire

7 Appendix II: Statistical Results and Calculations
7.1.1 Questionnaire Responses: Categorization
7.1.2 Questionnaire Responses: Leadership Style Evaluation
7.1.3 Questionnaire Results: Team Effectiveness Evaluation
7.1.4 MANOVA Tests’ results and acceptance/rejection of null hypothesis Done by XLSTAT Software
7.1.5 ANOVA Tests for Each Effectiveness Criteria and Impact of Leadership Style

8 Literature

Table of Figures

Figure 1: Three-dimensional complexity of EMVTs Leadership

Figure 2: Theoritical Framework

Figure 3: Team Effectiveness Big Five Model according to (Salas et al., 2005)

Figure 4: Team Effectiveness Model by (Hoegl and Gemuenden, 2001)

Figure 5: Sections of the empirical research instrument (Questionnaire)

Figure 6: Different categories of respondents

Figure 7: Distribution of participants based on their calculated leadership styles (No. of Participants)

Figure 8: Distribution of mixed styles participants based on their calculated leadership styles (No. of Participants)

Figure 9: Leadership Style of Interculturally-Trained (No. of Participants)

Figure 10: Leadership styles within the research sample

Figure 11: Impact of Leadership Styles on Team Effectiveness Criteria

Table of Abbreviations

Illustrations are not included in the reading sample

1 Introduction

1.1 Research Problem

Ever since the industrial revolution took place in the 18th century, leadership acquired more importance in modern business and management research. As the industrial systems grew exponentially and gained more complexity, the meaning of leadership has changed from “instruct and order employees without question” to “guide and motivate coworkers to achieve best performance despite the hard conditions”. This development in understanding what leadership means, established the basis of our modern research in management and organization theory.

Leadership is " an interaction between two or more members of a group that often involves a structuring or restructuring of the situation and the perceptions and expectations of the members" (Bass, 1985). It is also the process where the leader engages socially with team members to encourage them to participate in reaching the organization goals, where business objectives can be delegated to be performed by other members (Nanjundeswaraswamy and Swamy, 2014). The way how a leader can motivate and engage his teammates can differ significantly. While some leaders autocratically lead their team, preferring to keep their control on all decisions, receiving less or no input from team members and make all decisions by themselves. On the other side there are also a democratic leading approach, where the leader stimulate participation from members in the decision-making and there is more contribution from the group members compared to an autocratic leadership style (Cherry, 2006). Other researchers have categorized leadership styles to “Transformational Leadership”, where the leader is trying to transform group members and organization in terms of values, principals and moralities and therefore leaders keep the focus on the value and growth which the employees bring to the system. On the contrary a “Transactional Leader” sets the relation to the members as a “trade”, where the team members receive a benefit and give in return a service or exert some efforts to achieve certain goals or objectives (Nanjundeswaraswamy and Swamy, 2014).

Based on the later described leadership styles, research claims that the team performance differ significantly in terms of interpersonal relationships, team collaborations, communication effectiveness and quality of the team’s output or the performed task. While many authors have found that transformational and democratic leadership approaches achieve the best results in terms of team performance (Cherry, 2006), other researchers have surprisingly found that transactional styles have shown positive indicators in certain contexts (Hoxha, 2019) (Iqbal and Haider, 2015), which may have different dimensions based on business nature, cultures, task achieved and many other factors.

While the dilemma of team performance under the influence of different team leadership styles already gained importance in the modern business research, a specialized research efforts are necessary in regard to investigating this relationship in certain areas or specializations. In this work, the spotlight shall be focused on the engineering field due to the complex intersection between the technical and human aspects. Engineering tasks are often technically sophisticated assignments which require close collaboration and regular interaction between the team members. This fact causes the mission of leading engineering teams to be a difficult mission not only due to the technical challenges, but also due to the rising number of potential relationship issues which take place between the team members due to the close collaboration, which eventually can impact the team output in a negative way.

After deciding on engineering as the targeted area of research, this thesis shall focus on a certain mode of work which is virtual, remote and hybrid mode. Since the occurrence of COVID-19 pandemic, this mode of work has spread all over the world, due to the health protective measures such as lockdown and social distancing, that took place in that duration. After humanity has successfully beaten the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of enterprises have discovered great advantages in applying remote, virtual or hybrid work environments, either by saving operational costs, having access to a wider talent pool or providing flexibility to employees. Therefore, this mode of work has gained popularity and became more common in many areas, including engineering. As a results, many enterprises are currently forming totally virtual or hybrid teams, hiring people from all around the world, due to the richer talent pool, and working on complicated engineering tasks with their stakeholders geographically dispersed all over the world.

Due to the previously mentioned factors, managing team efforts in such collaboration engineering teams is considered difficult to manage because of three layers of complexity, as in Figure 1. Leaders usually face challenges coordinating between members, as there are a lot of cultural differences which must be recognized and solved to achieve a successful planning for task and resources. Additionally, the virtual complexity adds a geographical and temporal distance that can act as an additional challenge to a successful collaboration. Finally, engineering complexity adds another layer of difficulty to team leadership. In that context, this thesis will aim to understand the relationship between the applied leadership style on team performance and effectiveness in the context or multinational engineering virtual teams.

Illustrations are not included in the reading sample

Figure 1: Three-dimensional complexity of EMVTs Leadership

1.2 Research Questions

The thesis aims to answers some of the critical question which matter mainly to engineering team leaders, managers, project managers, and executives who lead teams that are active in the engineering field, in order to lead their team effectively and maximize their team’s performance. The research questions are as follows:

Q1 What is the uniqueness of engineering multinational virtual teams (EMVT)?

As mentioned, the aimed research sample carries 3 layers of complexity that can form a special challenge to leaders managing and leading the team, which are “Task/Business”, “Virtuality” and “Multinationalism/Multiculturalism”. Engineering by itself is a challenging task which requires a lot of collaboration and tightly coupled work, highly skilled group members and critical communication (Morrison- Smith and Luiz, 2020). Additionally, virtuality and multinationalism (better said, multiculturalism) carry also a lot of challenges such as geographical and temporal distance, group composition in terms of cultural background, work culture and socio-cultural distance (Morrison-Smith and Luiz, 2020) which extends the complexity into two additional dimensions. The questions aim to understand the nature of the researched sample, to discover the potential challenges which leaders can face while handling this type of teams.

Q2 What are the most common leadership styles within EMVT?

This question aims to explore the common leadership styles researched in the existent literature, with focus on those applied withing EMVTs. The target is; to understand the background and the theory of each style, definition of each style, how is it applied, its advantages and disadvantages. This information is important to decide the relevant leadership styles which will be picked to be investigated and later empirically researched. It is not expected to find a lot of literature on this case, as it is very specialized, but there is already literature on the topic of leadership of Multinational Virtual Team (MVTs) and Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) which is done in the context of engineering. On the other side, the empirical research can validate the assumption deducted from the literature, of the most common leadership styles, so it will contribute shaping a clear answer to the question.

Q3 What is the relationship between leadership style and team performance of EMVTs?

This research questions investigates if there is a link between leadership style from one side, and the team effectiveness and performance from the other side. It will be researched which criteria or components does each leadership style include, and when applying each style, does it have any positive or negative influence? Or it stays neutral. Additionally, the different facets of team effectiveness will be investigated and surveyed against the leadership styles in scope.

Q4 Can a certain leadership style, or a mix of leadership styles improve team performance?

As a following research question, and assuming that a direct link is found between leadership style and team effectiveness as mentioned in Q3, it will be investigated if a certain leadership style can improve the team effectiveness. Additionally, it will be researched if there is a certain mix of styles which are in use in the context of EMVTs, which causes a positive impact on team effectiveness and performance.

1.3 Research Design

The research is a mixture of literature research and empirical quantitative research. The aim behind the literature research is to explore the facets of Multinational virtual teams, engineering complexity virtual multinational context and which challenges does it come with. Afterwards, a deep dive in leadership theory, leadership styles, team performance and effectiveness (both terms will be used interchangeably in that work) and the potential impact of leadership styles on it.

After an extensive literature review, a questionnaire shall be conducted to link both components of the research together: “Leadership Style” and “Team Performance”. The questionnaire shall be conducted only within engineers who work in multinational virtual teams, in order to set the focus on that group and draw related research implications which can support engineering leaders and management professional achieve their team goals and thus fulfill organizational targets.

1.4 Structure of the Thesis

This thesis consists of 5 chapters, firstly an introduction to remote, hybrid and virtual teams in multinational context, focusing on the challenges which face engineers in that context and the planned research questions. Then a literature research and quantitative empirical research shall be conducted as mentioned in chapter 1.3. Afterwards, data gathered through empirical research shall be validated with the respective statistical tools. Main findings shall be drawn up and then the research questions and hypothesis shall be answered and validated respectively. In the last chapter a conclusion shall be made, which encompasses the highlights of the research, including limitations and future suggested research directions.

2 Hypothesis and Methodologies

The thesis comprises a set of hypotheses which correlate the main variables of this work. Figure 2 shows the theoretical framework, hypothesis and the relations between the research variables. The detailed hypothesis and corresponding methodologies are as follows:

H1. Leading multinational virtual engineering teams exhibit a high degree of complexity compared to other teams in the organization.

The hypothesis is based on the idea that engineering teams have some characteristics that distinguish them compared to other teams within the organization. It is claimed that engineering team members usually have some characteristics in common, such as conceptual thinking, ability to work on relatively unorganized tasks, data collection and analysis, and working in cross functional teams (Lee, 1986), problem solving skills and self-efficacy (Bond et al., 2015), good communication skills (Oladiran et al., 2011). Furthermore, the nature of the tasks in engineering teams differs from other teams in the organization. It is usually a complex task which involves multiple stakeholders with different functions, some of the stakeholders are distributed geographically. The nature of the tasks also requires close collaboration and extensive coordination by management staff. Additionally, the virtuality and multinational dimensions to the formerly described challenges, can have a direct influence on the work environment in EMVTs. Based on the previous analysis, the first assumption was raised. The conflicts within EMVT may be affected negatively by factors such as distance, complexity, and diversity. Or it can be affected positively due to personal and interpersonal skills, self-efficacy and other characteristics which usually engineers being chosen based on. Based on the criterium mentioned, it can be hypothesized that leading such teams comprises a higher level of complexity compared to other teams in the organization.

The methodology planned for testing this hypothesis is through extensive literature research, which will review the existing literature work done on MVT. It is aiming to understand the nature and the challenges of MVTs and how the complexity of the leadership increases, especially in engineering context. Besides, the literature review will also consider the effect on team dynamics in engineering teams when working in multinational-virtual context focusing primarily on team dynamics such as collaboration, communication, trust, satisfaction and productivity.

Illustrations are not included in the reading sample

Figure 2: Theoretical Framework

H2. EMVT Team performance is directly affected by the leadership style.

The relation between team performance and leadership is already researched and investigated extensively, especially in conventional team setup. The role of leadership in setting team goals and expectations and encouraging innovation and creativity (Zaccaro et al., 2009), building trust and collaboration and motivating team (Chou et al., 2013) providing support and opportunities and leading by examples (Putri and Renwarin, 2023). Additionally, many researchers tried to figure out which leadership style can bring the best performance of the team based on studies and surveys carried out on teams from different sizes, industries and cultures. Furthermore, and since the COVID-19 pandemic took place, focus has been brought on the performance of teams functioning in virtual and hybrid modes. However, research which links the performance and effectiveness of a multinational virtual engineering teams to a specific leadership style doesn’t exist until now. This hypothesis assumes a direct effect on the style of the leaders and the dynamics of the team and thus can affect performance positively or negatively. The methodology planned for that hypothesis is a mix between extensive literature and empirical research. The literature research will be conducted in topics including leadership theories and styles, team effectiveness and performance models beside the literature reviewed in the light of H1. Afterwards, a quantitative empirical study will be executed to identify the best leadership style for EMVT performance. The quantitative research will consist of a two-parts questionnaire which is based on the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and Teamwork Big Five Questionnaire for Hybrid and Remote Teams (TBFQHR). The first part, which is based on (MLQ) aims to filter the group of participants into 3 groups, transformational-led, transactional-led and Laissez Faire-led members. The second part of the questionnaire aims to evaluate the performance of each group, based on specific criteria, defined by the Teamwork Big Five Model, established by (Salas et al., 2005). The Salas’ big five model mainly focuses on five mains aspects essential for understanding and improving team dynamics, especially in complex and uncertain environments, which are Mutual Performance Monitoring, Backup Behavior, Adaptability, Team Orientation and Team Leadership (Salas et al., 2005).

H3. Improving EMVT team performance is possible when applying certain leadership styles or a mix between styles.

Based on the results of the quantitative research, and if H2 proved valid, the potential links between leadership styles and different team effectiveness facets shall be investigated. That shall be executed through a two-sided analysis for both leadership styles and effectiveness criteria. Firstly, by statistically analyzing which style has a greater effect on effectiveness, and by evaluating which effectiveness or performance aspect can be affected by leadership style and which not.

3 Literature Review

To have a broad and meaningful overview on the leadership styles and its effects on the EMVT performance, a literature review on different sides of the topic shall be conducted. Firstly, an overview on the definition and characteristics of Multinational virtual team will be conducted. The goal is to understand how the virtual teams have emerged and evolved through history and how business needs accompanied with technological tools, such as communication technology advancement, have participated in forming its current configuration. Also, further exploration of the benefits of multinational virtual teams will be made, to understand the forces behind spreading this work mode intensively in modern business, especially in the previous decade, and expectedly in the foreseen horizon too. As a next step, a deep dive in the characteristics of EMVT will be done, focusing on three dimensions, task nature (Engineering), mode of contact (virtuality) and team composition (multinationalism). As each of the previous aspects has its challenges and advantages, it is crucial to investigate as the first step the consequences of each aspect. Consequently, intensive research regarding leadership theory and styles, with special focus on its consequences on different team performance aspects. Finally, an overview over the team performance definitions and models will be executed, in order to understand what is the best suiting model which can fit for the research methodology.

3.1 Engineering Multinational Virtual Team (EMVT)

3.1.1 What is a Multinational Virtual Team (MVT)

It is not documented when exactly the first multinational virtual team has been created, but one of the earliest utilizations of such teams emerged in the 70s of the 20th century, during the oil crisis, where the concept of teleworking was introduced, as the field workers used to access the office equipment remotely, to avoid repetitive transportation between the sites and the offices (Garro-Abarca et al., 2021). In the 90s, as the communication technology and the internet has spread and utilized especially in the information technology and software development industry, more companies have incubated the concept of multinational virtual teams, to integrate global human resources concept (Ebrahim et al., 2009) and to make use of their overseas expertise in Asia and Europe, which were cooperating on mutual projects and contributing regularly on specific task with colleagues located in headquarters or other subsidiaries. In 2019, and during COVID-19 pandemic, the term of remote working gained significant importance, due to the crucial need to keep the continuity of the business without breaking the lockdown rule or exposing any employee to any health risk. Consequently, many companies have shifted their business to partially- or fully remote, and dozens of virtual teams have been formed within each firm, which many of them involved already various nationalities and overlapped through different contents and time zones, which became the “new reality” to conduct business worldwide. Since then, the research has intensively focused on virtual teams, especially multinational ones, to understand the dynamics within it and what are the motivations, characteristics and challenges which face them, and how can leaders who manage such team can excel managing their teams and support them improving their performance and achieve the team’s and organization’s goals.

Literature defined MVT as a group of geographically distributed people, working together on a project or a task, utilizing advanced communication and information technology to cooperate and coordinate their tasks to achieve a common organizational goal (Schlaegel et al., 2023). Therefore, MVTs normally include a rich mixture of nationalities, cultures, languages, beliefs and ages which enriches the experiences and knowledge of the group, as a whole, from one side and forms a challenge for the group to communicate and coordinate on the other hand. MVTs have merged not only because of the pandemic effect and its resulted health and safety concerns, but also to meet the needs of the globalized marketplace. Many multinational engineering firms make use of their worldwide-distributed expertise and talents to coordinate their products, service and prices throughout the world, to ensure the consistency of their portfolio and enhance the process of launching global products or services (Harvey et al., 2007).

The organizational drivers of engineering firms to form and support MVTs is not only for health and safety reasons as applied in the pandemic time, but also for a set of other reasons, which we can claim that firms have come across during the application of remote-work concept in that period. Firstly, organizations can achieve huge cost reductions when depending on MVTs (Alkoud et al., 2023), starting with fixed costs such as rent, travel and accommodations costs which can be intensively reduced when hiring people remotely, as firms don’t have to provide fixed workplaces for all employees. Firms can also save costs associated with employee’s recruitment and training when hiring remote employees. Secondly, firms can reduce their employee turnover rates by forming virtual teams, due to the flexibility they provide to employees and the improved work life balance. A lower turnover rate can help firms achieve further cost reduction due to decreased recruitment and employment costs. Another organizational advantage of forming MVTs is to a better access to global talent pool, as firms have the possibility to hire the finest talents worldwide regardless of their location of physical presences

(Alkoud et al., 2023). This is expected to leverage the firm’s performance and thus its competitiveness in the market. On the other hand, a virtual employee enjoys a better level of flexibility due to their ability to work from their homes or the place of their choice, which saves time and cost for the employee, and contributes improving employee satisfaction and performance (Prasad et al., 2002). By enabling remote working, a firm’s competitive advantage can be improved due to the previously mentioned factors, and also other factors such as creating the best value, better team outcomes and greater productivity from limited resources (Mahdy et al., 2020). However, firms must understand the nature of MVT, as it accompanies various challenges which imposes difficulties managing those teams effectively and achieve the organizational goals.

3.1.2 Characteristics of MVT

To understand the nature of MVT’s in general and the ones active in engineering in particular, we must dive into the characteristics of those teams. Then we can understand if there are any traits which distinguish them from the conventional teams in the organizational at all. Distance is the main characteristic which distinguishes all MVTs including engineering ones. The literature classifies distance into three main categories: geographical, temporal and perceived (Morrison-Smith and Luiz, 2020). Geographical distance represents the physical distance between different employees due to their existence in different locations. The lack of the presence of employees in the same location can have a huge impact on communication and understanding and thus the effectiveness of cooperation between the members and consequently affects the team productivity and the quality of the final product. Temporal distance refers to the difference in time of the different team members due to time shift or being in different time zones, or difference in work patterns, which hinder some members from interacting and collaborating on their common task. Perceived distance refers to a team member’s own feeling on her/his distance towards other team members. Distance can impose a set of challenges on the MVT performance, such as lack of team members’ awareness of their context, hardship establishing trust, hardship motivating other members, discrepancies in technical infrastructure and technical competencies and alignment of goals.

Diversity of group composition is another major characteristic of all kinds of MVTs. Socio-cultural differences of team members refer to difference in values and practices which includes language, culture and motivational discrepancies between team members. This for example can be noticed in individualismcollectivism cultural differences. While individualism values independence and self-reliance, collectivism emphasize on group integrity and interdependence. Literature Review 11

Having members from both cultures can cause misunderstandings and challenges collaborating. This can affect how the team members interact together and therefore can have a great influence on the team collaboration. Work Culture can also play a major role in establishing a successful collaboration. As two members from different socio-cultures but have similar work cultures can have an effective collaboration, compared to two members that belong to the same socio-culture, but they don’t share the same work culture.

Task type or nature of work, which refers to the degree of difficulty of the task and how close should the team members work, to achieve the task. A Task which requires close collaboration is mainly a complicated task which needs a continuous communication and high trust level between the team members to achieve a high performance. An engineering task is considered a high-collaboration task, which involves regular and close communication, knowledge of specialized terminology and standards, common background and experience between the team members, to ensure the complete understanding of the scope of work and the respective details of the tasks.

Leadership and Management is also a crucial challenge of MVT in general and EMVT in particular as found by (Morrison-Smith and Luiz, 2020). The author has emphasized that as the number of team members grows, it gets difficult to manage the team efforts, especially in projects with high collaboration level. Due to the difficulties caused by distance, it gets harder to establish an effective communication with members who are geographically distanced. Solving conflicts caused by cultural differences, managing team interdependencies and ensure close coordination become an increasingly harder assignment to team leaders and managers under the circumstances of an EMVT.

3.1.3 Uniqueness and challenges of EMVT

Reflecting the previously discussed characteristics and challenges of MVTs on Engineering teams, more specific challenges can be derived. From Task type or nature of work aspect, we can notice certain challenges which are either coupled with engineering task’s technical complexity such as according to (Neches, 2012) insufficient preparation for the project or the task, complicated processes which reduce flexibility, loss of information due to employee’s retirement or resignation and the need to an intensive collaboration within the team. (Lal, 2018) claims that the standard process by itself such as managing project requirements, architecture, design, implementation and verification is by itself a complex process. And the final project’s success depends crucially on the success of each of these dependent processes. In a highly complex engineering projects or tasks, technical interdependencies may take place such as closely coupled processes, shared technical objectives, dependent project deliverables, which are vulnerable to weak communication due to distant or members diversity as the case in EMVTs.

Due to multinational aspect in EMVT, various challenges can be created, for example, some challenges can occur due to the difference in engineering education systems, or different problem-solving analysis methods which vary from a country to another. A huge challenge which can also take please is the difference in standards and regulations between different countries or regions. This deviation can cause discrepancies in the outcomes if it is not clearly processed and managed on the team level. Similarly, as it exists in standards, there are huge variations in certification processes, quality control systems, safety and compliance requirements that can cause huge misunderstandings within an engineering team which work in a multinational context.

While Communication is the magic word to solve the challenges presented in EMVTs, it is by itself another challenge due to distance. The lack of human interaction causes a virtual distance between members which may hinder a close collaboration, building trust and technical credibility remotely. Difference in time zones can also play a role in not synchronizing the team members. Besides, most of the EMVTs use mainly English as a main communication language, which not everyone speak as a mother tongue which can limit communication and cause misunderstandings. Furthermore, technological coordination represents a challenge which can affect the project in a negative way. Usually, EMVTs use various digital collaboration platforms, and digital communication methods, which can be challenging for certain employees. The usage of complex project management tools and the coordination of parallel workflows can be challenging to manage in a virtual-multinational environment.

3.1.4 Team Dynamics in EMVTs

After we have researched MVTs and its characteristics, from distance, diversity through nature of work and challenges in leadership, followed by understanding how MVTs are unique in the context of engineering, the next step is to understand how performance aspects are influenced by the nature of EMVTs in the available research literature. For this section, five aspects were picked to have an overview how team effectiveness and performance is being affected, which are trust, productivity, communication, collaboration and satisfaction.

Trust is proved through research to be a crucial aspect that influence team’s productivity. (Hakanen and Soudunsaari, 2012) has proved trust is an important team building aspect, especially for high performing team. They emphasized on its importance on how it catalyzes exchanging ideas and opinions and raise their concerns and questions. They claim that if the teams lacks trust, team members tend to hide their feelings and refrain from helping each other. Therefore, an engineering team without trust will lose the ability to create value and will to establish the social networks necessary to be high performing.

In another work, (Hakanen et al., 2015) implied on the importance of trust in high performing teams and claimed that it needs honest and open communication in order to be built. Through effective communication, sharing experiences and respect each other, trust can be achieved which can enable engineering teams to be high performing. The researchers highlighted the connection between trust and commitment and how can it be established on the team level through interaction. The researchers have implied that not any interaction can result into trust. However, it must be a regular and diverse, and not only based on fact level.

In the virtuality context, various researches were made to evaluate the effect of virtuality on trust. (Hacker et al., 2019) have investigated the nature of virtuality and how can it be categorized into low and high synchronized, based on communication medium. Low and synchronized communication mediums are based on many factors like speed, types of symbols used, ability to handle multiple messages at once, ease of practice, and ability to review messages. The researchers have proved that virtual environment which has synchronized communication have a direct positive effect on trust in virtual teams. This type of virtual environments can improve the team ability to agree on shared understanding or agreement on the meaning of a concept, which is called convergence. Through convergence, team can establish a deeper levels of trust that helps them predict how their teammates will respond and react in different situations and improve their collective performance.

Moving to the next aspect in EMVTs, productivity is one of the crucial terms which have been research in engineering and also in MVT contexts. (Johnson and Zimmermann, 2019) have investigated the effect of workspace on engineering productivity, especially for those working in software engineering. The research concluded that communication, social norms and private workspaces are directly coupled with productivity and satisfaction of engineering teams. Positive social norms can lead to a supportive work environment with high level of collaboration withing the team members. Besides, having an accessible communication to team lead and other members results in an effective collaboration and successful problem solving. (Liao et al., 2011) has researched productivity in engineering projects and the project factors which positively influence it. The study establishes a direct connection between engineering productivity and project size, type, priority and involvement. The study has measured productivity by the number of actual work hours compared to the number issued for construction. Factors such as Project Quality Management, and Front-End Planning (FEP) and Project Priority have been closely related to engineering productivity. As quality management ensures involving the necessary practices and processes to achieve project quality standards, Front-End Planning emphasizes on the investment in early planning phase of the project to improve productivity. Besides the study has emphasized on the importance of some project specific characteristics, such as Project Size and Project Type.

In the virtual context, (Morrison-Smitt and Ruiz, 2020) have suggested useful measures to apply within team members, to improve productivity within virtual teams, which are relevant also to EMVTs. The researchers have suggested to enhance communication and trust between the members, to manage expectations, avoid misunderstandings and reduce distances. Also, the paper has suggested deploying technology platforms and tools to facilitate synchronous and asynchronous communication. (Hamersly and Land, 2015) have concluded the relation between a bigger set of aspect which can influence virtual team productivity, but on the enterprise level. The work highlights the importance of the governance structure which enables managing various projects of difference sizes and nature within the enterprise, the design of the enterprise, which can allow teams to function independently, under the governance of the organization, and stability of the management, which requires transparent communication, effective leadership and a clear vision.

In addition to productivity and trust, job satisfaction is an important aspect in EMVTs which influences team effectiveness. (Franca et al., 2018) has investigated job satisfaction and motivation within engineers, especially in the software industry. The work has defined job satisfaction as an emotional state which an employee realizes in case of succeeding at fulfilling his job’s objectives. The criteria of job satisfaction include both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, such as the feeling of accomplishing when successfully meeting their tasks, recognition from teammates, supervisors or customers. Additionally, knowing that the job has practical impact enhances the feeling of job satisfaction. Indeed, the work environment or mood plays also a great role in defining the state of satisfaction in software engineering teams. (Storey et al., 2019) has also investigated the factors affecting job satisfaction within engineers, with focusing on challenges which can influence it. The work has highlighted the importance of team culture and impactful work similar to (Franca et al., 2018) but also distinguished the importance of having a good team leader and the effective use of employee skills in the assigned tasks. (Storey et al., 2019) has warned that ineffective software architectures and tools, beside the poor management, negatively affect job satisfaction with software engineering industry. The research has also drawn a direct connection between high level of job satisfaction and the productivity of team members.

In the virtual context, there are a lot of other variables which must be considered in order to keep employees satisfaction level on the healthy level. (Gurtner et al., 2007) found that, because of the virtuality nature and factors such as reduced face to face interaction, and technological dependencies which cause trust and communication effectiveness to decline. Consequently, the study found that the level of satisfaction with teams is directly connected to the level of virtuality of the team, which is connected to the proportion of virtual communication compared to face-to-face communication, connected also to the number of team members who are located at the same workplace. The later mentioned factors are important to define the degree of virtuality, as this research found that most organizational teams fall into a hybrid category, using both face-to-face and virtual communication, rather than being purely virtual or purely face-to-face.

The next vital aspect which is necessary for EMVTs success and can heavily affected due to EMVT nature is communication. The topic of communication in team was highlighted and researched in different contexts in the literature i.e. software engineering, design, research and development and other industries. It was also analyzed in the global or multinational teams, and also in conventional teams’ context. (Hirst and Mann, 2004) has introduced a 5- factor model of communication within R&D teams, which broke down team communication under 5 main components. Firstly, leadership communication, which is vital to catalyze innovation and support boundary spanning. Then, Communication safety, which is a safe environment for the team can communicate and exchange and discuss ideas openly necessary for project success. Also, team boundary spanning, which means the team exchange and communicate with stakeholders to gather resources and information. Additionally, team reflexivity, which assumes that team which respond to new circumstances and adapt faster to their processes are more effective. Finaly, task communication, which represents clear communication of goals, feedback and requirements necessary for the project to succeed. The study has concluded the importance of communication withing R&D teams and directly linked it to project performance. Besides, it provides important insights on how task communication and communication safety for successful project completion and customer satisfaction. (Den Otter and Emmitt, 2008) had investigated the importance of communication withing architecture engineers. This work has focused on the media richness theory and how face to face interaction is crucial for architecture engineers for effective interaction and feedback processes. (McDonough et al., 1999) had a different look on product engineering team, as they considered the virtual-multinational or -global aspects too, which is unique compared to regular teams due to cultural, temportal and geographical differences. The study has highlighted interesting facts due to cultural differences especially in problem-solving, communication with leaders and decision-making practices when applied on 3 teams from France, US and Japan. In problem solving approaches, some teams were preferring to conduct analysis before action, while other teams prefer a trial-and-error approach, which changes the type of information required to solve the problem. Communicating with leaders was also as diverse as decisionmaking approaches, as some teams prefer to question and have an open dialogue with their leaders, while other teams preferred only formal communication with their leaders due to cultural restrictions. In decision making, some teams preferred to have a general agreement between the members before deciding, while others made their decisions independently, using less amount of information. These examples show the great variations between cultures in those specific aspects, which reflects how the situation can be diverse when having members from multiple cultures within an engineering team. Another interesting finding by this work that using voice calls was positively associated with performance compared to video calling, which had negative connection to performance according to this research. (McDonough et al., 1999) highlighted the importance of managers who understand the communication need of their team and suggested to use a combination of different communication approaches to meet these needs, also highlighted the importance of real time interactions and face to face meetings which will lead to an organization which depends more on flexible work hours and the need of regular presence meetings, despite its assigned logistic hardships and costs.

3.1.5 Conflicts in EMVT

As an authentic and natural part of work life, conflicts have gained importance in research, especially to understand what the possible conflicts forms and classifications are. the most adopted conflicts classification is the one mentioned in (Abiodun 2014), that categorizes work conflicts into 3 major groups, each group embed various reasons of conflicts, which are: Relationship Conflicts, Task conflicts and Process conflicts”. As the former classification is the most common in research, it will be the one incubated in this work. By understanding the meaning and the major examples of the most important conflicts listed under each category, a sufficient understanding of work conflicts in team can be understood.

Relationship Conflict has been reflected by (Gigol, 2019) as it is mainly an “emotional” dispute. He claims that the motives of relationship disputes are usually unrelated to work. (Abiodun 2014), claims that the main reasons of relationship conflicts are a lacking affinity and an existing dissonance in interpersonal traits between the team members. confrontations, tension and irritation can be listed under this category of conflicts. These types of disputes can generate further negative emotions within the team members such as nervousness and discontentment and fear of being rejected by the team. In a team where there are unresolved relationship conflicts, interpersonal conflicts will rise and it will be challenging to establish a healthy communication between the team member, and thus there will be a direct effect on team performance.

Unlike Relationship Conflicts, Task Conflict has a direct link to the nature of work being done by the team. For example, a team member can have contradicting points of view on the method of achieving a certain task, the steps of execution, and the concept of the final goal of the task. This contradiction can stem of different background, experiences or viewpoints (Abiodun, 2014). It can also be produced by incompatible vision of perspectives or different sequence of tasks (Verma, 1998). It has been argued that task conflicts can have huge benefits if handled appropriately. (Lu et al., 2011), claims that task conflicts support open expression and thus leads to a better exchange of ideas and eventually a better result. The later result will have a positive effect on the performance of the team and consequently the performance of the whole organization. However, if this type of conflicts is being neglected, it can produce lack of teamwork and job satisfaction (Abiodun 2014).

The 3rd type of work conflicts is the Process Conflict. And while most of the work in work conflicts focused on “Task Conflicts” and “Relationship Conflicts”, “process conflicts” were somehow mistaken with task conflicts and were not attaining sufficient attention from researchers. To explain what does “process conflicts” mean with an example, assume that team members are emotionally capable of handling their disputes. They have also agreed on how to achieve the task and what are the steps towards the final goals. However, if the members don’t agree on who is responsible for each subtask, or who is going to delegate a certain assignment that is a “process conflict”. (Kuriakose et al., 2019) found that “Process conflict” occur between team members over logistical and delegation matters. He also claims that this type of conflicts is the most damaging form of conflicts compared to the other two. The reason behind that is, process conflict can create a damaging consequence on the long term, compared to relationship and task conflicts which their consequences is likely to be on the short term.

(Hamed, 2023) found that engineering teams differ from the other teams in the organization regarding the number and type of conflicts developed, the effect of intercultural training, and team size. It has been found that engineers who work in a multinational virtual team have significantly reduced relationship conflicts between them, however, they incur a lot more task conflicts than in face-to-face mode. Research has also found that engineers find difficulty solving their conflicts virtually, either task or relationship conflicts. The research also raises a red flag related to intercultural training. While most of the respondents already received intercultural training, however, it seems it only played a major role in reducing relationship conflicts but seems to be inefficient in supporting engineers in handling their task conflicts. Regarding language, the research found that using a first language or foreign language in engineering MVT didn’t influence conflict creation.

After having a wide overview on multinational virtual teams’ advantages, characteristics, challenges and dynamics, it is clear how important is the role of leadership in leading and maintaining such teams. The next chapter shall couple those concepts with leadership theories and styles and shall serve as a base to the empirical research planning.

3.2 Leadership Styles

After having a broad overview on the history and evolution of multinational virtual team, and focusing on those active in engineering fields, understanding their characteristics, challenges and conflicts, it is time to explore leadership theories and styles and their corresponding literature, in the ways to finally understand how leadership style can influence EMVT performance.

3.2.1 Overview of Leadership Theories

Ever since humankind evolved and the groups and moved through the Eurasia, a leader was always needed to guide the groups, resolve their conflicts and protect them from predators by teaching the group defense strategies. As primitive as the scope of a leader in early human groups is, the same apply to early leadership theories which evolved in the mid-nineteenth century, with the great man theory. This theory established by Thomas Carlyle in the 1847, assumed that great leaders are born the way they are, they are neither made nor trained, and therefore, it focused on researching the traits and characteristics of great historical personalities, which were believed to be great leaders (Benmira and Agboola, 2021). Such theories always imagined a leader as heroic and it exclusively assumed that leadership is a male characteristic and mainly connected it to military leadership (Amanchukwu et al., 2015). These set of theories focused on the eventmaking man who influenced the series of events, which wouldn’t take the same course if he hadn’t intervened. (Nawaz and Khan, 2016) mentioned that great man theories are ethically questioned as many of the examples who were considered as great leaders have committed unethical deeds, especially those who led nations or armies. Therefore, the leadership theories have progressed after that from the idea that leaders are born and destined to lead, to that they lead due to the existence of certain trait or character, which enable them to lead at a particular time.

Trait Theory is the natural evolving of great man theory, but however, it assumed that great leaders can be also made. The traits which make a great leader according to this theory can be either inherited or taught. It aimed to move from the idea that great leaders are just a natural phenomenon, to discovering what are the traits of great leaders and study their behavior (Benmira and Agboola, 2021). The traits of great leaders were classified into two categories. Appearing traits, such as height, mental abilities and attractiveness, which are mainly genetically inherited. And influence traits, which are mainly learned or obtained by experience, such as charisma, Rhetoric and knowledge (Amanchukwu et al., 2015).

As the early leadership theories focused on the characteristics and traits of good leaders, behavioral theory which was developed in the 40s and 50s of the last century, focused on that leaders are made, not born. It suggests that people can become leaders through the proper training and learning, where they can gather the sufficient skills to become effective leaders. (Vasilescu, 2019). It was found that leaders’ behavior which can affect the team can be classified into task, relations and change oriented, beside external leadership behaviors. Task oriented means to explain the task, planning it and monitoring execution. Relations behavior means supporting team members and working on their development and acknowledging their input. Relations-orient behavior means supporting change and catalyzing innovation and collective learning. Finally, external leadership means representing the team externally and networking with other stakeholders (Yukl., 2012)

Contingency and situational theories developed in the 60s of the twenty-century focused on the specific time or the situation where a specific trait is must be applied. Therefore, it paid a great attention to the environment where the leaders interact with. The theory defines the effectiveness of leadership based on how suitable the leader’s characters with the leadership style, and the situation in question (Fiedler, 1958). Furthermore, the theory claims there is not any leadership style which can fit in all situations. Because of the relation between the situation and the leadership style applied, this theory is known as “contingency” theory (Benmira and Agboola, 2021). Situational theory focused on the ability of the leader to evaluate the situation and then to decide which leadership style is suitable, also depends on the readiness of the other members (Hersey and Blanchard, 1969). A leader can act in both authoritarian and democratic style based on the knowledge of the group members he leads and cruciality of the situation they are involved in (Amanchukwu et al., 2015).

Participative theory as established by Lewin, is defines as the behavior of involving other team members in the process of the decision-making process, even though the leader can be the final decision maker, this style requires intensive participation and collaboration from the team members. Lewin suggests that this style catalyzes creativity and engagement in the group. Lewin found in his research that groups which were led autocratically may be slightly more productive than democratically led groups, democratically led groups have however better output quality. Organization provides employees with a degree of discretion and important information and facilitate employee’s participation. The goal is to support a sense of ownership, so that employees see themselves as responsible for achieving organizational goals and making successful decisions for the organization and collaborate to solve organizational challenges.

Transactional leadership theory, also known as managerial leadership theory, is a theory established by James Burns in the 70s of the last century. The theory suggests a system of benefits and punishments, by which the relationship between the leader and the team member is defined. Those benefits and punishments are decided based on the employee’s performance in terms of goal achievement. And therefore, it is the leader’s responsibility to define clearly what are the responsibilities of the employee and the consequences of not meeting these expectations (Amanchukwu et al., 2015). The philosophy of this theory is to keep the system running the same as it is, without any focus on future improvement or change. This leadership theory is suitable for projects which are urgent or crucial, due to its clear structure, tasks, responsibilities and consequences (Odumeru and Ogbonna, 2013).

Transactional leaders are concerned about process and not about innovative ideas the main goal is to supervise and organize team performance and the exchanges that take place between leaders and members. Based on leaders’ estimation of the outcome of the team member, a so-called “contingent reward” or “contingent penalty” is applied. A contingent reward can be in a non-physical form such as gratitude or praise, or in a physical form such as financial raise. The goal of the reward is to either show appreciation to the employee or to keep the competition between the team members. The reward is being granted in case the performance or expectations set by the leaders is fulfilled. On the other hand, if not fulfilled, the member receives a punishment, until the member fixes or adjust his output to the required level or standard (Odumeru and Ogbonna, 2013).

Transformational leadership theory on the other hand, focuses creating a connection between the leader and the team members, therefore, this theory is also called “relationship theory”. The theory suggests that this created connection between the leader and the team members creates integrity and motivation within the team. This theory usually being compared to charismatic leadership theory, which assign certain traits to leaders such as confidence and extroversion to become effective leaders. (Amanchukwu et al., 2015). This theory encourages leaders and members to refrain from personal interest and focus on the common good. Leaders are then required to focus on the members personal goals in order to motivate and enable members to become “leaders” and have a certain degree of entrepreneurship That doesn’t mean that leaders deviate from organizational goals or team goals, however, transformational leaders should be concerned about fulfilling members personal potential along with fulfilling and supervising targeted the performance of team (Nawaz and Khan, 2016). The interaction between leaders and team members is done based on common values and goals. Leaders are also required to rearrange their personal interests and target for the needs which achieve the common good or the higher order needs. Transformational leaders are able to identify the potential for improvement, agree with others on common goal, create a plan to reach the goal and drive the change. In order that the leaders achieve this, leaders have to handle their team members individually to improve their skills, values and vision by appreciating contributions. Therefore, the transformational leadership is usually being distinguished with the ethical extent (Nawaz and Khan, 2016).

(Bass 1985) has defined four components for transformational leadership, which are ideal influence, which means that leaders act as role models, earn admiration and trust. Inspirational motivation, which means that leaders set the vision which motivate and inspire the team members. Then intellectual simulation, which means leaders should encourage innovation and creativity by challenging the “status quo”, and finally individualized consideration, which mean that leaders should provide individually to their team members personally customized support, which fits the member’s values, beliefs and developmental goals. Now being able to have a sufficient overview of the leadership theories, their philosophy, focus and history, the next step will be having an overview of certain leadership styles. Main goal will be, identifying the characteristics of each style, and how can it affect the performance of EMVT members.

3.2.2 Transformational Leadership Style

In the previous subchapter, we have taken a look at the leadership theories in general, including transformational leadership theory. We have also learned that transformational leader is a proactive leader, who will aim to establish a connection with the team members, to create integrity, increase motivation, establish trust and improve collaboration. Therefore, this leadership style has several advantages on organization, team and members. Firstly, it increases overall job satisfaction and performance of the organization. As a result, this increases the organization ability to survive in the market as well (Smith, 2015). As the group member have a better emotional connection to the leader and the organization, they are better attached to the goals set by the organization. While the leader actually focuses less on managing the small detail, she or he cares more for providing support to the team. As a results, the group levels of trust, innovation and creativity rises with a strong motivation to achieve. Also, group members tend to stay in touch and have lasting communication after reaching the set goal (Asiya, 2012). Another study by (Yanagilo, 2023) proved empirically the relationship between transformational leadership and competitive advantage. The study gives evidence that the main components in transformational leadership style that help organizations to attain competitive advantage over their rival competitors are quality results and important innovations. Finally, (García-Morales, et. al, 2008) has distinguished the effect of transformational leadership on the creation and sharing knowledge withing the organization. He claims that transformational leader invests heavily in developing personal and collective knowledge in the organization. As a result, huge organization growth takes place, affecting positively organization innovation and as a result, competitive advantage.

Beside all the above-mentioned benefits, transformational leadership still can have disadvantages. Focusing mainly on virtual teams, (Chaplin-Cheyne, 2021) found that virtual team’s performance can be negatively affected by such leadership style. The researcher claims that in that team-mode, the leader finds hard communication with his team due to geographical or temporal distance. That results that the team members are struggling to create a personal relationship or a connection with the leader, it may cause them to doubt the leader’s credibility. Leaders must overcome this challenge by finding alternative medium to provide and monitor team communication. The same result was mentioned by (Díaz- Sáenz, 2011), as the factor of trust in transformational leader weakens in virtual context. Same researcher found that transformational leaders don’t have advantage compared to transactional leaders in terms of performance. Therefore, the assumption that transformational leadership is suitable for any context is not accurate and ignores the situational factor.

The literature claims that transformational leader must have a certain set of leadership traits to be successful and effective. However, there is always discrepancies in defining those traits. The most set of traits in discussion are the big five, which are Extraversion, which means the tendency to seek excitement and be outgoing and assertive. Second is agreeableness, which means being highly trustworthy and kind to others. Then conscientiousness, which is related to achievement, authenticity and dependability and the only one matching with job performance criteria. Then emotional adjustment, which helps leaders to get over negative feelings such as anxiousness, fear and depression. Finally, intellectance or being open to experience, which refers to level of creativity, imagination and thoughtfulness (Judge and Bono, 2000).

However, other research found that not all of the big five are actually crucial for effective transformational leaders (Prochazka et. al, 2018) found that conscientiousness is the only trait which has direct influence on effectiveness. They also claimed that this factor is cross-cultural. The same research has also surprisingly proved that extraversion doesn’t have relationship to transformational leadership effectiveness. The researchers assume that their method of research depended more on the quality of the behaviors coordinated with extraversions, instead of judging through number of behaviors assessed by MLQ (Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire), which is the usual method used in such research.

As already mentioned, transformational leadership may not be suitable for all contexts, research found that such leadership style suits the most certain managerial situations. In environments which require more innovation and works regularly on problem solving, transformational leadership can support the team to think outside the box and challenge the status quo, which will catalyze creativity and inspire new ideas. In periods of significant organizational changes, such as merges or restructuring, leaders can support change management through continuous motivation and support to their team to overcome resistance. Also in crisis situations, transformational leaders can provide stability through their strong communication to provide a clear vision and gather the team around the organizational goals (Mehdiyev, 2024).

3.2.3 Transactional Leadership Style

While we observed how transformation leaders are proactive leaders, who aim to foster new ideas and change the organization culture, on the other hand, transactional Leadership, applies focus on the importance of supervision and group performance. Transactional leaders are responsive leaders, who work mainly within the defined organizational culture without aiming to change it. Those leaders try to motivate subordinates through a system of contingent rewards and punishments and try to attract them to his own interests. Furthermore, they follow management-by-exception, which means, keeping status quo and force correct actions to positively influence team performance (Odumeru and Ogbonna, 2013). In transactional leadership, the term management by exception also belongs, where leaders are supposed to spot any deviation from the practices and regulations which they set, and they apply measures in order to correct it. They make sure that goals are realized within the defined cost and time, and they apply rewards or punishments accordingly.

This leadership style is coupled with many advantages. Firstly, it is a fair and equal method to exchange benefits and to establish relationship between the leader and the employee. It enables the employee to achieve organizational goals, by promoting employee’s collaboration, trust and shared interests. Leaders can also plan resources efficiently and fulfill rules and regulations. Additionally, transactional leader focus on employee’s development as they are a crucial resource for the organization, therefore many of transactional leaders provide training opportunities to their employees, however, it limits the employee ability to grow autonomously, and it is less compared to transformational leadership (Dong, 2023). Nevertheless, it was found that transactional leadership is directly related to job performance and productivity, even in comparison with transformational leadership, as it encourages the employees to meet their defined goals and reward them accordingly (Riaz and Haider, 2010).

(Crews et. al, 2019) found that transactional leader use highly precise communication level to pass their orders to their employees, besides, it has also proved that they use lower level of verbal aggressiveness in general, however, this behavior changes if the organization goals are not met. Finally, they proved that transactional leaders have very weak connection to emotional manipulation therefore it is rare to be utilized. (Huang et. al, 2010) found that transactional leadership provides enough motivation to team members to accomplish organizational goals, it is unlikely to focus on motivating the team members to create collaboration environment. Regarding job and employee satisfaction, (Riaz and Haider, 2010) found that transactional leadership style has a strong relation in terms of job success, which means obtain appraisals or financial rewards in case of fulfilling the defined goals, this increases the employee feelings regarding career success and growth. The later deviates from, career satisfaction which the transformational leadership has a direct impact on, which is coupled with the support and the vision of the leader on employee’s career development and growth, and also the emotional attachment of the employee to the organization due to the achievement done through the career time.

One of the disadvantages of transactional leadership, according to (McCarthy et al., 2008), that is a so-called “tough-love” relationship. The leadership model is based on a top-down structure where the transactional leaders, especially in soviet era based on the research output, considered themselves responsible for satisfying the needs of the employees and their families, which included the right to punish those who haven’t fulfilled the orders as well. Therefore, this leadership style utilize fear as a main motive for employees, including fear from being accountable, failing or punished. The same research claims that transactional is short term relationship and not an effective long term leadership style. According to (McCarthy et al., 2008), it doesn’t have the ability to establish a long term sustainable and competitive organization. According to the same research which was conducted in Russia at the first decade of this century, that distance due to power has always existed between leaders and their subordinates, where authoritarian leaders who give orders and important information and make the crucial decisions, from one side, it may have the advantage of increasing loyalty to leaders but form the other side it creates fear and puts most of the responsibility on the leaders shoulders, and deprive subordinates from any decision-making responsibilities.

In another research, (Dong, 2023) claims that transactional leadership reduce employee’s participation and engagement, and limits their personal development and highlighted the risk that it could lead the organization to instability if leaders used their power to use employees for their interest and exploit them. Therefore, he highlighted the need to a fair and transparent relationship to support the subordinate’s morale and organization stability. (Gul et al., 2012) draw a direct link between employee turnover rate and transactional leadership, as he found employees prefer to rather work in transformational environment.

(Pillai et al., 1999) claims that the difference in top-down relationship in both transactional and transformational leadership cause subordinates to have different sense of justice inside the organizations. The research claims that transformation leadership enhance trust due to the vision and perception which the leaders provide to their subordinates. While transactional leadership only provide “distributive justice” between subordinates and doesn’t affect trust, which of course shows the advantage of transformational over transactional leadership.

For a transactional leader, the most highlighted traits in the literature are, the ability to motivate and guide their team members to achieve the defined goals. Therefore, a transactional leader must also confidence and determination a long with very good communication, to pass the goals and instructions to subordinates. Good planning skills are also crucial to draw the big picture where each subtask is allocated to the suitable member. A transactional leader must also have effective and accurate decision-making skills, due to the higher amount of authority of decision making which they have, compared to transformational leaders. However, there is a risk that transactional leaders turn to authoritarian leaders in case of having the aforementioned skills excessively (Dong 2023). In another research conducted by (Bono et al., 2004), it was found that transactional leadership is directly connected to conscientiousness and agreeableness, which is related to contingent reward, and neuroticism which is connected to passive leadership.

3.2.4 Laissez-Faire / Passive Avoidant Leadership Style

Laissez-faire as a term is a French word which is widely used in economic and political studies. It means that the government has minimal or no intervention in the affair of the people and the society. Similarly, a laissez-faire leadership means no interference or influence on the team members (Tosunoglu and Ekmekci, 2016). In contrary to the other discussed leadership styles (transactional and transformational), the leaders of that style don’t avoid taking responsibility and have no or minimal interactions with their subordinates. It was also described in various research works as “Abdicates responsibilities avoid making decisions” Therefore, it is called by various researchers as a non-leadership. It is worth highlighting to emphasize that the terms “Laissez-faire leadership” and “passive avoidant leadership” overlap greatly. However, while laissez-faire can be a deliberate and strategic leadership choice in certain environments (e.g., R&D teams), passive-avoidant leadership is typically seen as problematic and characterized by neglect and lack of responsibility. In practice, the two styles often overlap, especially when laissez-faire is applied without the necessary team maturity or structure.

Nevertheless, this type of leaders gives the complete authority to team members to execute the necessary work decisions. Besides, they have the freedom to work in the manner they want. While leaders mainly avoid making the decisions and don’t involve in the decision-making process, they provide to the subordinates the necessary knowledge and material to make the accurate decisions (Chaudhry and Javed, 2012). Despite that almost all the research done on this leadership style describe it as zero-leadership, non-leadership, absence of leadership, avoidance of intervention or even destructive leadership, few other research works claim it may have positive influence on the team members, based on the context. (Yang, 2015) claimed that most of the research done on Laissez-faire leadership is biased from the start and assumes that this style is non-strategic and therefore has negative influence.

As a results of the enormous amount of research which explore the negative side of Laissez-faire leadership, a lot of disadvantages can be discussed. (Skogstad et al., 2007) has claimed it is not only a zero-leadership, but it is also a “destructive leadership” on the long term. Due to job ambiguity and unclear roles, this style induces a lot of stress in the workspace and can affect the job satisfaction of subordinates to deteriorate immensely. In addition, (Breevaart and Zacher, 2019) highlighted other disadvantages and compared it to its corresponding when applying transformational leadership. In a research based mainly on team members feedback, it was found that leaders when applying a laissez faire style were found less effective. Members were also less satisfied with their leader’s performance. There were many stressors that took place due to the absence of the leader, which caused role ambiguity and led to many conflicts. As a results, members were faced by hardships in collaboration and communication. Performance of the team was caused to deteriorate due to lack of social relationship with the leader, and consequently, lower support and motivation of the subordinates. (Tosunoglu and Ekmekci, 2016), had a similar conclusion on trust. Their research claims that a laissez-faire leader loses trust to the team members, and this is mainly because of two factors. Firstly, lack of integrity, which resulted by the deviations between team’s expectations of the leader behavior, and the actuals actions. Lack of integrity causes deteriorated confidence and lack of trust. Secondly, lack of interpersonal relations between the members and the leader causes the perceived appreciation of the leader and the organization to the members to decrease. Which can void trust in the leader and in the organization on the long term.

On the advantage of Laissez-faire style, there is not much research done in that aspect, expect for few works. (Yang, 2015) assumed that this style is not negative by itself, but it depends on the context, where the style is being applied. The work assumed that the lack of involvement of the leader is a strategic choice and doesn’t mean inactive or unresponsive. However, the research claims it can be done for various purposes i.e. a special consideration of expertise of expert groups, or as in the situations that the leader is acting as an ethical leader, without imposing power on subordinates. As a result, (Yang, 2015) claims that lack of intervention of leaders in Laissez-faire style can cause advantages, such as high Independence, high self-motivation, autonomy and empowerment. When the subordinate has the adequate level of leadership and self-reliance, a high level of empowerment and autonomy can lead to a better performance and high job satisfaction levels especially for long-experience subordinates.

Laissez-faire leadership is therefore suitable for teams composed of highly skilled and experienced individuals, who require minimal supervision and can make accurate decisions independently. It can be assigned in creative and innovative environments, such as engineering research and development or design teams, where team members normally have the freedom to experiment and explore new ideas. This leadership style also benefits self-motivated and autonomous teams, enhancing job satisfaction and productivity. Additionally, it works well in high-trust environments where there is a strong level of trust between the leader and team members, enabling them to manage their tasks and responsibilities independently.

3.2.5 Comparison of Leadership Styles

Illustrations are not included in the reading sample

3.3 Team Performance

3.3.1 Definition and Importance of Team Performance

Team performance is the measurement of how effective a team is. In other words, to measure team effectiveness, team’s outcomes are evaluated and compared to certain standards. According to this measurement process, we can evaluate the level of effectiveness of a team (Salas et al., 2017). The same work has categorized the outcomes of teams into three categories, individual, team and organization outcomes. Individual outcomes are those who are connected to the team member’s behavior with the team, which directly influences performance. On the team level, team outcomes are those which include all members of the team, such as collaboration and communication. On the organizational level, team’s outcomes are the tasks and projects and how they influence the organizational performance. The researchers have highlighted the importance of team performance and its direct connection to the organization performance and effectiveness. (Scott and Tiessen, 1999) have highlighted the importance of the team performance, especially its relation to team compensation. They focus on the importance of linking the reward or the compensation of the team members with the team outcome and how it is a crucial tool to motivate the team and to foster successful collaboration. Therefore, (Scott and Tiessen, 1999) emphasized on avoiding the incorrect measuring of the performance of the team, which may neglect a significant portion of the team efforts and thus can affect the reward, and consequently the team members’ satisfaction level. The researchers suggested that when measuring team performance, it has to be done through measuring the team’s collective outcome, as attempting to highlight the contribution of certain team members may cause animosity and deteriorated team spirit. In another work, (Brewer and Mendelson, 2003) have emphasized on the importance of team effectiveness measurement. It was proved that measuring and assessing team performance improves the team dynamics, especially collaboration and communication, and therefore positively influence the team output, and ensure it is fulfilling the organization’s goals and objectives.

In the context of virtual engineering teams, (Hecker and Lang, 2000) have explored the team performance measurement especially for high technology production. In that specific use case, which is semi-conductor development and production, the importance of performance measurement was crucial due to several reasons. Firstly, the need of reducing costs associated with the products, which forces the organization to improve its competitiveness in all the areas, which means a better performance with less cost. Secondly, due to the high complexity of the industry in discussion, strict processes are needed to stir the development and production tasks with a precise process of performance measurement, to assign accountability. On the other hand, having a precise performance measurement is challenging due to the communication barriers, caused by the dynamics of the virtual team i.e. challenges due to temporal and geographical distances, cultural differences, technology dependence for communication.

(Hecker and Lang, 2000) have development a performance measurement system which is based on three components, which are performance against schedule i.e. number of projects completed on time, internal customer satisfaction i.e. measuring customer satisfaction aspects such as timely deliveries and quality , and team health, which was measured through investigating team goals, processes and members, to build a picture of how the team functions together. The model has also integrated an improvement tool which focuses on team attendance, commitment and accountability. Through that system, the researchers claim to have a powerful path to align the team with the organizational foals and enhancing the overall performance of the team.

3.3.2 Team Performance Models and Measurement

Now as the importance of team performance and effectiveness models and its relation to organization competitiveness is known, this chapter will shed the light on some of the most common ones in the literature, with special focus on research work which applied these models to assess and evaluate engineering teams. The goal is to have a brief overview on the picked models and their key dimensions. This will establish the ground of suitable model chosen for the empirical research of this work.

Starting with GRPI model, it is a framework established by Richard Beckhard in the 70s of the last century. The model was illustrated by various research works focusing on its structure and advantages. (Raue et al., 2013) highlighted the model goal to improve and enhance team effectiveness by focusing on four major aspects, which are goals, roles, processes and interactions. According to the model, the goals must be clear, shared and agreed on based on SMART criteria. The roles mean, to define responsibilities, authorities and tasks to support the team’s and organization’s goals. The processes are the standard paths for decision making communication and conflict management within the team. Finally, interactions, which aims to establish open communication and build team trust between members. The model’s advantage is to provide clarity at each level which helps the team to mitigate conflicts and improve team performance.

In the same decade when GRPI model was developed, Bruce Tuckman has revisited the Tuckman’s model, which he developed and made vital improvement to it. The original Tuckman’s model consists of four sequential stages, which are forming, which means that the team members establish relationships to develop or form the team. Followed, by storming, which describes competition and conflicts that take place between team members when they challenge each other’s and assert their opinions. Then, norming, which describes the team’s effort to overcome conflicts, set rules, norms and expectations and establish their way towards collaboration. After norming, then the team is ready for performing, in which the team functions with a good efficiency, cooperate effectively to achieve the team common goals (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). Tuckman has eventually added a fifth stage which is adjourning, which expresses the task closures, celebrating team achievements or reflecting on the team’s challenges or mistakes. In general, the model emphasizes the importance of understanding and navigating these stages to enhance team effectiveness and productivity.

Another example of team effectiveness models is the Lencioni’s model, derived from Patrick Lencioni’s book (Lencioni, 2002). The model differs from the previous two examples, because instead of focusing on the criteria which leads to team success or development, it highlights the challenges and which the team faces. The model identifies 5 major dysfunctions which are lack of trust, absence of commitment, avoiding accountability and neglecting results. Lencioni claims that the mentioned factors hinder team teamwork and collaboration as it creates barriers within the team. Therefore, focusing on those challenges can result in an improved trust, effective commitment and accountability, which leads to successful team results.

Despite the rich research content available about team effectiveness models, it is rare to find any research work that applies team effectiveness models to engineering teams. One of the few research projects works that applied this idea is the work done by (Dings0yr and Dyba, 2012). It has investigated three different team effectiveness models which stem from both psychology and management backgrounds.

The first model which is also the most famous, known in the literature as “Teamwork Big Five”, which was developed by E. Salas, D. Sims and C. Burke. The model identifies five core criteria which are essential for successful teamwork which are Team Leadership, Mutual Performance Monitoring, Backup Behavior, Adaptability and Team Orientation. (Salas et al., 2005). Team Adaptability refers to the leader ability to coordinate activities, assess performance, assign tasks and develop team sills. It also includes motivating other members and creating positive team atmosphere. Performance Monitoring refers to the ability to develop a shared understanding of the team environment and the team’s ability to monitor each other’s performance, ensuring the successful completion of the tasks. In addition, Backup Behavior refers to anticipating needs and providing support by for example, distributing workload on the team members during busy occasions. Furthermore, Adaptability means that the teams adjust team strategy based on changes in the environment or the team dynamics, to ensure that the team ability to respond effectively. Eventually, Team Orientation refers to the team mindset which prioritize team goals over individual goals, encouraging team cooperation and valuing team input. The model utilizes 3 additional components which are Closed Loop Communication, Shared Mental Models and Mutual Trust, which play the role of a crucial coordinating mechanisms which the support the mentioned five core components. Figure 3 illustrates the relation between the main core components and the coordinating mechanisms of the model according to (Salas et al., 2005).

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Figure 3: Team Effectiveness Big Five Model according to (Salas et al., 2005)

Despite the model’s advantages that it is based on extensive empirical studies which provides a solid foundation for it, and also being dependent on leadership, which makes it relevant for this research, it has a disadvantage according to (Dingsøyr and Dybå, 2012) that it doesn’t focus on self-managing teams, which makes it unsuitable for Laissez-Faire leadership style.

The second model which was investigated by the research was developed by (Dickinson and McIntyre, 1997) especially for self-managed teams. It measures the quality of teamwork and team effectiveness through six factors, Communication, Coordination, Balance of Member Contributions, Mutual Support, Effort, and Cohesion. uses many mechanisms similar to (Salas et al., 2005) such as Leadership, Orientation and Support Behavior, with the addition of Coordination and Feedback Mechanisms, which didn’t exist in Salas model (Dingsøyr and Dybå, 2012).

The third and last model discussed in the scope of software engineering teams’ performance and effectiveness is the one designed by (Hoegl and Gemuenden, 2001), which was built based on management science as already mentioned. The model was designed to survey the relation between the Quality of the Teamwork, Team Performance and Personal Success in the context of innovation projects as shown in Figure 4. It can be noticed that the Hoegl model uses many criteria similar or same as in Salas model, such as Mutual Support and Communication. However, Hoegl model adds an important dimension which is the importance of Team Cohesion in influencing Team Motivation.

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Figure 4: Team Effectiveness Model by (Hoegl and Gemuenden, 2001)

4 Empirical Study

4.1 Research Setting and Framework

4.1.1 Research Environment

To investigate the team performance of engineering multinational virtual teams, and its relationship to leadership styles, quantitative empirical research was conducted to collect primary data. The decision to depend on primary data is because of the uniqueness of the research problem and questions that are connected to an exclusive research sample (Multinational Engineers working in Virtual Environment). Besides, there was a need to analyze particular criteria for such teams, using specially designed research instruments i.e. leadership styles, performance and effectiveness of such teams. In other words, there was no available data on the targeted research sample, and even if research on the targeted group exists, it would likely be irrelevant due to the combination of the researched criteria.

As the research was conducted on a remote, virtual and hybrid groups, the research was not designed to target a particular location neither took in consideration the geographical aspect of the participants, as it applies the concept of location fluidity. According to this concept, the team consists of a mix of members who work remotely and in-person, on different days of the week or months. Based on this dynamic nature, the location of the members varies frequently and therefore considering any location criteria for the participants is irrelevant for the research.

The research was done in the form of an online questionnaire, which was made available on various platforms on the internet in April 2025. The questionnaire was shared mainly on professional groups on professional social platforms such as LinkedIn.com and Xing.com and other specialized groups on social media such as Facebook.com. Besides, it was posted on the online research community SurveyCircle.com.

4.1.2 Research Design

The research consisted of three main sections, which verify and measure different sets of criteria and parameters. The philosophy behind the design is to lead the participants through three consecutive stages/sections. The first section of the questionnaire serves as a validity check for the participants, ensuring that each participant has experience working in an engineering team, either as an engineer or in a supporting role such as procurement, project management, etc. This is important to collect only relevant experience for the target group. Another question was included in the validity check to ensure the remote, hybrid and virtual experience of the participant, for the same reason. In addition to the validity checker, four more questions were added to categorize the participants based on 4 criteria, which are age, years of experience, gender and existing intercultural training. The age factor was added to investigate if a certain generation has an advantage or a preference regarding performance and leadership style accordingly. Also, number of years of experience was added to the questionnaire to verify the effect of professional exposure on the respective leadership style. Additionally, the participants were categorized according to gender and level of intercultural skills. However, the research didn’t consider any categorization of the targeted sample based on ethnicity, race or culture.

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Figure 5: Sections of the empirical research instrument (Questionnaire)

The second section of the questionnaire is dedicated to categorizing the participants into 3 main leadership styles, which are Transformational, Transactional and Avoidant/passive Leadership. For that purpose, this part of the questionnaire is based on the famous MLQ questionnaire, designed by B. M. Bass and B. J. Avolio, to assess a full range of leadership styles. The MLQ framework consists of 45 questions in total, 35 of them are dedicated to assessing leadership styles, and the last 9 of them are designed to assess leadership outcomes. The questionnaire tests the transformational leadership through 5 scales which are Idealized Influence (attributed and behavior), Inspirational Motivation, Intellectual Stimulation and Individualized Consideration. After that, transactional leadership is tested through 2 scales which are Contingent Reward and Management by Exception (Active). Finally, Passive/Avoidant Leadership is tested through another 2 scales: Management by Exception (passive) and Laissez-Faire Leadership. Afterwards, Leadership Effectiveness is assessed through 2 scales, Satisfaction and Extra Efforts. The MLQ has a vital advantage, as it is validated across various organizational level, contexts and cultures and therefore it was decided to base the research instrument on it.

When integrated with this research empirical research instrument, the MLQ (rater form) was used, and was shortened by removing the last part related to leadership effectiveness. The reduction has mainly two reasons, firstly, reducing the total number of questions of the research instrument and shorten it, secondly, leadership effectiveness is planned to be assessed afterwards as a part of the team performance, by the second part of the research instrument.

The third part of the questionnaire is based on another existing instrument, although it is less common than the MLQ. The instrument named TBFQ (Teamwork Big Five Questionnaire), also TBFQHR (...for Hybrid/Remote Team), is research validated instrument, designed to assess teamwork effectiveness, also in hybrid and remote settings. The instrument is based on the Teamwork Big Five Model, by (Salas et al., 2005). The TBFQHR instrument, designed and validated by (Nagy, 2023), consists of 60 questions which measure team effectiveness through 10 different components, which are Shared Goals, Coordination, Team Spirit, Attention to Results, Adaptability, Psychological Safety, Effective Communication, Organizational Support and Motivation.

The TBFQHR instrument was validated through quantitative research by (Nagy, 2023) with a sample of (n=304) and acceptable Cronbach’s Alpha values for the 10 components. Besides, all items significantly positively correlated with the total score. However, the instrument has a drawback that even though many organizations and teams participated in the quantitative research of (Nagy, 2023), two organizations account for 62% of the sample, which may limit the generalizability of the results. Applying the TBFQHR on this thesis work may contribute to validating it.

Furthermore, the TBFQHR instrument was modified to reduce the number of questions that measure team effectiveness. Therefore, instead of incubating the complete set of questions (60 questions), the instrument was shortened to 36 questions in total, by either removing the questions which measure the exact or similar aspect, also by removing some aspects which don’t have a high level of importance according to the point of view of the author of this thesis work. Furthermore, after comments from various participants, a few questions were rephrased for simplicity and clarity. The complete questionnaire can be found attached in Appendix I: Research Questionnaire of this work.

4.2 Data Analysis

4.2.1 General Overview

The questionnaire was posted online for 6 weeks and gained 53 responses in total. 4 responses were excluded due to irrelevance (2 never worked in remote or hybrid teams, 1 never worked in engineering), additionally one respondent answered all team effectiveness questionnaire with (1: once in a while), which doesn’t seem to be a realistic reflection of a work environment, so it was decided to be excluded as well. The respondents were generally categorized according to 4 different categories: years of experience, birth year, gender, and intercultural training. Around 88% of the participants have at least 6 years of experience or more, which reflects that most of the respondents have a good level of professional experience. Besides, around 90% of respondents are born between 1980-1994, with an additional 5 participants being born after 1995, which can indicate that the sample is not very rich in terms of age variance and represents greatly a certain generation. Gender-wise, the sample shows enormous male participation with 92% of the total participants, which announces two inconsistencies. Firstly, the sample reflects greatly the male component, secondly, it reflects the need to more female engineers in general. Lastly, almost more than half (55%) of the respondents have received intercultural training in the past, the factor which brings important question marks: as half of the sample don’t acquire a sufficient level of intercultural education and training, how likely this section of participant to be having a high level of team effectiveness. And, how important is it for multinational engineering teams to attain such knowledge for effective team performance?

Years of Experience

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As a first step for the data analysis, the questionnaire responses were extracted to an excel table, to be ready for further analysis. The participants were then divided into 4 categories based on their team leadership style, according to their MLQ responses. Each participant has an MLQ score of 3 components, based on their score of the different question types, which represents 3 different leadership styles: Transformational, transactional and Passive avoidant. For those who obtain similar scores for two different leadership styles, their leadership style will be denoted as “Mixed”. The detailed response evaluation can be found in chapter: Appendix II: Statistical Results and Calculations: 7.1.2. The following table shows how the classification was done for the different respondents based on their score (4 is full scale):

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Table 1: Example on the determination of overall leadership style based on the MLQ part of the questionnaire.

After filtering the sample into 4 styles as mentioned above, it can be noticed that more than half of the sample belongs to teams which mixes between more than one style of leadership. Next to mixed styles, transformational leadership comes first as a biggest sector with a sole leadership style. Eventually, transactional and passive avoidant leadership come as the least common styles in EMVTs with 8% and 6% respectively.

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Figure 7: Distribution of participants based on their calculated leadership styles (No. of Participants).

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Figure 8: Distribution of mixed styles participants based on their calculated leadership styles (No. of Participants).

Considering the big sector of participants with mixed styles, a further examination was conducted to explore any significant findings which may stem from the data. Interestingly, 75% of participants with mixed styles scored similar scores for both (Transformational - Transactional) styles. The majority of mixed styles participants were equally distributed on (Transactional-Passive Avoidant) styles and (All Styles) with 12.5% for each. There were not any participants who had similar (Transformational - Passive Avoidant) styles. This interesting finding may reflect an important leadership fact of EMVTs that a common style of leadership which mixes greatly between transformational and transactional styles may be existing and needs a closer focus to investigate it.

Another interesting fact regarding interculturally trained teams is that most of those teams have a mixed leadership style (Transformational-Transactional), then those who have pure transformational style. This fact emphasizes the same conclusion that the mixing between transformational and transactional styles deserve better attention and focus to understand its application and impact on team performance and effectiveness.

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Figure 9: Leadership Style of Interculturally-Trained (No. of Participants).

4.2.2 Descriptive Statistics

The first step of analyzing leadership style impact on team effectiveness is to use descriptive statistics. In Table 2, team effectiveness results for all the 4 leadership styles were examined through calculating key descriptive statistics indicators i.e. mean, standard error, standard deviation, sample variance, kurtosis (Peakedness), skewness (Distribution Symmetry), range, minimum and maximum values. He calculations in Table 2 are done based on the questionnaire team effectiveness results illustrated in Appendix II: Statistical Results and Calculations: 7.1.3. Respondents who belong to teams being led by transformational style have clearly scored the highest average compared to all other styles (>3) for all effectiveness criteria (4 is full scale), except for 3 criteria which were slightly less than 3 (adaptability = 2.91, coordination = 2.91 and attention to result = 2.79). Besides, respondents have concluded that transformational style has the highest averages on (organizational support = 3.29, Shared goals = 3.21, and coping with remote conditions = 3.41) between all leadership style. The standard error of transformational style is also very low (<0.2), which indicates that the sample mean is a more accurate reflection of the population mean. Despite the average high scores on all the effectiveness criteria, the standard deviation and variance indicate that there is a quite wider variance of the data set around the mean, which can also be proved through the minimum and maximum scores on all of the effectiveness criteria. We can clearly observe that in all effectiveness criteria under transformational style; the minimum score is around or sometimes less than 2. In other words, even though transformational leadership may be effective with most of the members of the teams run by that style, some members who are hardly satisfied or unsatisfied to some extent, still exist.

Skewness, which is defined as a distortion of the curve from normal distribution or standard bell curve, indicates in which form the distribution of the values deviate. Checking skewness of the effectiveness criteria of transformational style, we can notice that most of the effectiveness criteria are slightly skewed, means that their distribution is almost symmetrical around the mean. However, we notice that coping with remote conditions is highly left skewed (-1.15), which means that there are majority of higher ratings with a few much lower ratings. The later highlights that transformational style strongly supports and is compatible with virtual teams. However, adaptability is moderately right skewed (0.64), which means that there are more low ratings, with fewer higher ones. Given the fact that the relatively lower average of adaptability (3.41) versus coping with remote conditions, the sample indicates that despite transformational teams has coped with the remote conditions i.e. “managing the balance between work and private life” or “preparing a workspace properly equipped and well-connected to the Internet or the company network”, the level of adaptability i.e. “changing needs or environments to ensure the long-term success of the team” or “regularly reflecting on what has happened in the team and learning from the experiences” was not on the same level, although it was very high compared to other styles. Checking kurtosis factor, which is a measure of the curve’s “tailedness”. Organizational support and motivation have negative kurtosis (platykurtic) of (-1.57) and (-1.22) respectively, which indicates that the distributions have lighter tails and have a flatter peak. Considering that the average of both effectiveness criteria are (3.29) and (3.07) respectively, the kurtosis factor indicates overall high scores for transformational leadership regarding both organizational support and motivation. In other words, the great majority of engineers working in teams led by transformational leaders are satisfied with the organization's support regarding policies related to hybrid/remote working and also satisfied with the IT tools used in the team. Besides, the majority of them have high motivation due to the availability of the learning opportunities provided by the team and the organization, the feeling of making an important contribution to the team and getting fair recognition for a job well done. Last finding regarding kurtosis factor is that “Coping with Remote Conditions” is slightly (leptokurtic), which means a sharper peak and more values near the mean. In otherwards, there are many respondents who have very high scores (3 or 4) with fewer ones with slightly less scores. However, on average, coping with remote conditions has the highest average score between all the effectiveness criteria as already indicated.

Applying descriptive statistics analysis on transactional style, we can notice that the majority of the average scores of effectiveness criteria are (< 3), except for Empirical Study 43 adaptability (3), Team Spirit (3.17) and organizational support (3.29) when we compare those values with transformational leadership, we can notice that all the values are in favor of the transformational style except those 3 values which mentioned earlier (Adaptability, Team Spirit and Organizational Support), which transactional style has surprisingly have better averages. A logical explanation can be done for this phenomenon, especially for both adaptability and organizational support, which is related to the context of the questionnaire. When we revise the questions regarding both adaptability and organizational support, we can notice that they don’t have something to do with leadership style but focus mainly on the success and performance of the team. For example, Adaptability focuses on “adapting quickly to changing environments to ensure the long-term success”, “learning from the experiences” or “addressing problems that arise in a timely manner” which is more related to team and business performance. Besides, organizational support is mainly related to information availability, organizational policies and IT system that enable the employee to do his job successfully, which is a vital process to conduct a business successfully and not related to a certain leadership style. However, this logical explanation of how transactional leadership outperformed transformational leadership in “Adaptability” and “Organizational Support”, cannot be applied to “Team Spirit”. As transformational leaders dedicate more time to inspire and motivate team members, and promote intellectual simulation and collaboration, they are expected to have a better team spirit compared to transactional leaders, who mainly focus on clear structures, rewards and goal-oriented tasks. However, some transactional leaders tend to set interpersonal connections between the team members to catalyze performance. Due to that sample members who are led by transactional leadership are so few compared to transformational leadership, coincidences can play a role in randomly having majority inside transactional leadership sample (2 out of total 3 members) which voted for a better team spirit compared to transformational leadership.

Another interesting fact about transactional leadership is that the lowest score given on any effectiveness criteria was that give on “Attention to Results”. When looking into the details of this result, we notice that transactional members have high scores in questions related to completing tasks on time and to a high standard, which have scores higher than 3 by all participants. However, parts related to communicating between members to improve each other’s output or to notice the small gaps missing in each other’s work were poorly scored. This had a great effect on the overall score of “Attention to Resul” criteria. Besides, this phenomenon highlights the nature of competition between team members inside transactional- led teams, even though teams have already a good level of team spirit, as mentioned before. Similarly, it can be noticed that teams led by transactional styles have less scores of coordination (2.5) and shared goals (2.5), compared to transformational style, which again highlights how transformational leadership can lead to an overall better performance. The sample error of the transactional leadership style is high (between 0.2 and 0.7), which indicates that this sample may not be precisely representing the population, and that is indeed can happen due to the small number of participants who are led by transactional leadership. Based on the same fact, the sample has a bigger standard variation and variance compared to transformational leadership. Besides, kurtosis factor wasn’t able to be calculated as the minimum number of participants of this sample is less than the threshold required to calculate this factor (4 participants).

Applying descriptive statistics on passive avoidant leadership style, it can be noticed that the average values for almost all the effectiveness criteria are poor (< 2), except “Coping with Remote Work”. The lowest rated criteria are Shared Goals (1.4), Coordination (1.5) and Attention to Results (1.6). This fact highlights the role of the leader in forming team understanding in shaping common goals and on completing their tasks on time and to a high standard. However, team members working under this type of leadership have a good level of Coping with Remote Conditions, which doesn’t have a strong connection to the leadership activities itself. Furthermore, the results show a low standard error rate of the results, which indicates the precision of results compared to the population mean. Regarding skewness, Coordination (1.41) and Organization Support (0.75) are right skewed, which means they have a majority of low responses with a few high outliers. On the other side, Team Spirit (-0.85), Coping with Remote Conditions (-1.41) and Motivation (-0.75) are left skewed which means that most responses are high with a few low outliers. The rest of the effectiveness criteria are balanced. Regarding Kurtosis factor, we can notice that Attention to Results (-3.32) Adaptability (-3.3) and Communication (-3.3) are Platykurtic, which indicates that the distributions have lighter tails and have a flatter peak. On the other hand, Coordination (1.5) and Coping with Remote Conditions (1.5) are tightly distributed around the mean (leptokurtic).

Last part of the descriptive statistics is to apply the same methods on the Mixed Styles participants. As mentioned earlier (check Figure 8), there is an absolute majority of participants who have mixed transformational and transactional styles, against all other types of mixed styles. Therefore, it was decided to only consider (Mixed Transformational-Transactional) members as they have a lot in common and can actually indicate a rising leadership style. The descriptive statistics of

(Mixed Styles - all) and (Mixed Transformational-Transactional) have been both calculated and added to Table 2 , but only the second category will be analyzed.

Under Mixed Transformational-Transactional Style, we can notice the overall high average scores for all effectiveness criteria. Similar to transformational leadership, most of the score average is above 3 or slightly under. In general, almost all of the scores for mixed transformational-transactional is less than pure transformational leadership, however, Motivation (3.21) is an exception. For that aspect, mixed style has scored slightly higher than transformational leadership. Regarding standard error, this claimed style of leadership has an overall average of (< 0.2) for all effectiveness aspects, which represents an accurate reflection of the bigger population’s results. The standard deviation and variance indicate that there is quite a variance of the data set around the mean, except for Motivation which has a wide range of opinions. When checking the maximum and minimum scores for the effectiveness criteria, we can prove this fact, as we can see values ranging between (4 = top score), to sometimes (1 = minimum score) which has been chosen by some participants for certain criteria such as Adaptability and Psychological safety.

When examining skewness, we can notice that both Attention to Results and Motivation both have positive skewness i.e. more low ratings, with few high ratings, of (0.77) and (0.38) respectively. Besides, Adaptability, Communication and Organizational Support (Skewness = -1.08, -0.64 and -0.82 respectively) have more high ratings with few low ones, which indicates more agreement by the participants on a certain level of the criteria. Regarding kurtosis, Communication is the criteria with the highest peak (Kurtosis = 0.99), which indicates that the responses are closely located around the mean. On the other side, Coping with Remote Conditions (Kurtosis = 0.99) have more spread responses and less concentrated input around the mean.

Table 2: Descriptive Statistics for the Team Effectiveness Criteria per Leadership Style

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4.2.3 Reliability Statistics

Reliability statistics is the method used to ensure consistency of the research instrument, e.g. questionnaires. It defines how reliable the instrument is, and if it will generate a similar output once repeatedly used in other environments. One of the most popular reliability statistics methods is Cronbach’s Alpha, which measures the internal consistency of the instrument. In other words, it measures how related the questionnaire’s items are.

As the questionnaire consists of two stages, to measure both leadership style and team effectiveness of engineering multinational virtual teams (check Figure 5), measuring the consistency of this research questionnaire by Cronbach’s alpha was conducted twice i.e. for each part of the questionnaire. The Cronbach’s alpha can be calculated through the following formula:

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Where:

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The calculation of the Cronbach’s alpha can be done as per the parameters below:

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Table 3: Calculation of Cronbach’s Alpha for both Questionnaire Parts

As indicated in Table 3, Cronbach’s alpha has a value of 0.87 for the leadership style part, while it has a value of 0.96 for the team effectiveness part. Usually, a value above 0.7 is considered acceptable and above 0.8 excellent. Therefore, those values prove a high level of internal consistency between the questions of each item and indicate a great reliability of the research instrument.

4.2.4 Inferential Statistics

Instead of using data to describe the phenomenon and the characteristics of the sample, as done with descriptive statistics, inferential statistics are used to conclude if the results obtained through the research sample can reflect larger populations. And as quantitative research of that work has obtained a relatively small group of responses (=50), conducting inferential statistic method is a crucial step to confirm if the research results can be generalized on the population of engineers in multinational virtual teams.

The first inferential test to be applied on the quantitative research results is Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). The test will compare the means of multiple independent variables (10 effectiveness criteria) for the 4 leadership styles surveyed. To apply MANOVA, we have to set two hypotheses (null and alternative), which their correctness will be proved based on the MANOVA test results. The hypothesis are as follows:

Ho (Null Hypothesis): Leadership Style has no significant effect on the dependent variables (Team effectiveness criteria).

Hi (Alternative Hypothesis): Leadership Style has a significant effect on the dependent variables (Team effectiveness criteria).

The next step would be executing one or more of the famous statistic tests of MANOVA to calculate F-value (Ratio of explained to unexplained variance) and P- value (probability of observing the result of H0 is true), and thus, deciding if the result of the research reflects a true relationship between leadership style and team effectiveness in general. Using the means of the 10 team effectiveness criteria for the 4 researched leadership styles, which already calculated through descriptive statistics (check Table 2), 4 MANOVA tests (Wilks’, Hotelling-Lawley's, Pillai's and Roy's test) could be executed through the XLSTAT software add-in installed on MS Excel. In Table 4, the results will be compared to illustrate if we should accept or refuse the null hypothesis. The calculations done by XLSTAT can be found in Appendix II: Statistical Results and Calculations: 7.1.4.

Normally, when p-value of a MANOVA test is too small (much smaller than 0.05), it is recommended to execute other tests e.g. Hotelling-Lawley’s, ...etc. and compare their outcomes, to ensure that the results calculated are reliable. Therefore, multiple methods have been executed as shown in Table 4, where it can be clearly seen that all the executed tests led to rejecting the null hypothesis i.e. acceptance of alternative hypothesis. In other words, the Multivariate Analysis of Variance shows a relationship between leadership style and the team effectiveness.

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Table 4 MANOVA Tests’ results and acceptance/rejection of null hypothesis

Despite the positive conclusion obtained above, where we could draw a relationship between leadership style and team effectiveness, it is not yet confirmed if all the 10 criteria of the team effectiveness, or only some of them, are impacted by leadership style. In order to investigate that, the following Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests have to be executed for each criterion of the 10 leadership effectiveness criteria. Based on the test, some factors shall be calculated such as P-value and F-value (already explained when executed MANOVA) and eta- squared factor, which represents how much of the total variance in the dependent variable is explained by the independent variable, simply said, it illustrates how much impact does each independent variable has.

Using the Data Analysis add-in in MS Excel, 10 ANOVA tests have been conducted, once for each effectiveness variable. For those tests, the null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis which were already set during executing the MANOVA shall be investigated. After calculating F-value and P-Value, and as we are going to compare the 10 ANOVA results collectively, there is a probability of a so-called Type I error (incorrectly reject a true null hypothesis in a statistical test). Therefore, and adjusted p-value shall be calculated by multiplying the calculated P-value x10.

The calculations done by MS Excel’s Data Analysis tool can be found in Appendix II: Statistical Results and Calculations: 7.1.5

Table 5: ANOVA tests for each effectiveness criteria impact of leadership style

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From table 5 we can see the results of the conducted ANOVAs and the interpretation of the results including if the results represent significance regarding the impact of the leadership style on each specific criterion. The first group of team effectiveness criterion, which have strongly influenced by leadership styles, there are (Shared Goals, Coordination and Motivation) which have smaller adjusted P- value (<0.05) and big eta-squared. For this group of criterions, we can conclude that the null hypothesis couldn’t be fulfilled and therefore the alternative hypothesis is valid. Secondly, there are the team effectiveness criterion which are marginally influenced by leadership styles, which have marginal adjusted P-values (around 0.05) and relatively big eta-squared values. This group combines (Team Spirit, Attention to Results, Communication and Organization Support). Finally, there is the group of criteria which are less likely to be affected by leadership style in a bigger population (not influenced) which are (adaptability, Psychological Safety and Coping with remote conditions). This set of criterions have very high P-value after adjustment and therefore fulfils the null hypothesis.

4.3 Main Findings

After examining the data collected of the empirical study statistically, the hypothesis of this work can be validated and research questions can be answered based on the research findings, which will be done in this part. Regarding the first research question: “Q1: What is the uniqueness of engineering multinational virtual teams EMVT?”, and as already stated in “Chapter 2: Hypothesis and Methodologies’”, this research question shall be answered through extensive literature research, which was conducted in subchapter 3.1. The literature research has concluded that Empirical Study 52

Engineering Multinational Virtual Teams (EMVTs) represent a distinct organizational phenomenon that combines the complexity of engineering tasks with the diversity and dispersion of multinational virtual collaboration. Their uniqueness stems from the intersection of three core dimensions: the technical nature of engineering work, the virtual mode of collaboration, and the multinational composition of the teams. Each of these dimensions introduces specific characteristics and challenges that, when combined, create a working environment unlike any other team structure.

On the level of technical complexity and task interdependence, engineering tasks are inherently complex and require a high degree of interdependence among team members. These tasks often involve multiple stages such as requirements management, system architecture, design, implementation, and verification, each of which is technically demanding and interlinked (Lal, 2018). In EMVTs, these stages are distributed across geographically dispersed members, which increases the risk of miscommunication and delays due to the lack of synchronous collaboration. The technical nature of engineering work demands continuous communication, shared understanding of standards, and precise coordination. According to (Neches, 2012), challenges such as insufficient preparation, rigid processes, and knowledge loss due to employee turnover are particularly critical in engineering contexts. These challenges are exacerbated in EMVTs, where the absence of physical proximity and reliance on digital tools can hinder the seamless flow of technical information.

On the aspect of cultural diversity and multinational variation, the multinational composition of EMVTs introduces a rich diversity of educational backgrounds, engineering practices, and cultural norms. This diversity can be a source of innovation and broader problem-solving perspectives, but it also presents significant challenges. Differences in engineering education systems, problemsolving approaches, and regulatory standards across countries can lead to inconsistencies in deliverables and misunderstandings within the team (Hamed, 2023). Cultural differences influence how team members communicate, make decisions, and interact with leadership. For instance, individualistic cultures may prioritize autonomy and direct communication, while collectivist cultures may emphasize group harmony and indirect communication (Morrison-Smith and Luiz, 2020). These differences can lead to friction, especially in high-stakes engineering discussions where clarity and precision are essential. Furthermore, language barriers—particularly when English is not the first language—can limit effective communication and increase the likelihood of errors (McDonough et al., 1999).

On leadership and conflict management, Leadership in EMVTs requires a solid understanding of both technical and cultural dynamics. Leaders must navigate the complexities of remote supervision, cultural sensitivity, and technical oversight. They are responsible for aligning diverse team members around shared goals, managing interdependencies, and fostering an inclusive and collaborative environment (Morrison-Smith and Luiz, 2020). On conflict development and resolution, it was found that engineering teams distinct in terms of number and type of conflicts developed, the effect of intercultural training, and team size. EMVTs have significantly reduced relationship conflicts, on the other side, they incur a lot more task conflicts than in face-to-face mode. Research has also found that engineers find difficulty solving their conflicts virtually, either task or relationship conflicts. Intercultural training plays a major role in reducing relationship conflicts but seems to be inefficient in supporting engineers in handling their task conflicts.

Therefore, and based on the results of this study, there is strong evidence supporting the hypothesis H1, indicating that it is valid, and proves the uniqueness of EMVTs.

After proving the uniqueness of EMVTs, the next research “Q2: What are the most common leadership styles within EMVT?”, investigates the most popular style withing EMVTs. The question shall be answered through the results of the quantitative research from the questionnaire, which is introduced in Figure 10. It can observed that the biggest sector of the participants is those who belong to teams which have mixed leadership components (two or more styles) based on the MLQ results. However, as mentioned before, the majority of the mixed styles category are teams which mixes between transformational and transactional leadership style (39%) with 6% of members in teams which mixes two others or more styles. The second most common styles in EMVTS according to the research results is transformational style (35%).

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Figure 10: Leadership styles within the research sample.

Beside that the research highlights the well-known importance of transformational leadership style on team performance, by focusing on inspiring and motivating followers through idealized influence and inspirational motivation, which was explained in details in chapter 3.2.2, the most important finding is that the research proved the popularity and importance of what is known in research by “Blended Leadership” or “Mixed leadership”, which consists of components of both transformational and transactional leadership. As (Dartey-Baah, 2015) has concluded, a tailored leadership style in VUCA environments needs to be developed, to facilitate teams to deliver high quality performance in such unpredictable challenges caused by complex and uncertain environments. According to (Dartey-Baah, 2015), the mixed leadership style integrates both transformational and transactional leadership styles especially focusing on strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability and performance orientation. Through those components, leaders can develop strategies that fulfills long and short-term goals, build strong relationships through emotional intelligence, manage changes effectively and focus on achieving high performance. By applying this blend of styles, it leverages the strengths of both styles, ensuring that leaders can handle routine tasks efficiently while also inspiring and guiding their teams towards future goals.

As illustrated in Figure 11, the impact of the 4 leadership styles are plotted on the spiderweb diagram for the 7 chosen team effectiveness criteria (Shared Goals, Coordination and Motivation) as strongly affected criteria and (Team spirit, Attention to results, Communication and Organization support) as marginally affected aspects. It can be proved by the unaided eye that there are leadership styles that positively influenced the overall team effectiveness criteria positively, and others which caused a deteriorated effectiveness score, which causes a poor performance. A leadership style such as passive avoidant, and regardless the literature work that suggest its potential positive influence, it can be concluded from the results of this work that it has the lowest averages on all 7 effectiveness aspects. In other words, we can conclude that passive avoidant leadership have a direct negative link to team effectiveness and performance. The same concept applies to transformational and mixed transactional and transformational style, where it can be clearly noticed that all of the team effectiveness criteria are positively influenced, and they scored the highest average scores for almost all the effectiveness criteria. Furthermore, transactional leadership shows better performance than passive avoidant leadership all over the effectiveness criteria. For some effectiveness criteria, transactional leadership showed higher scores than the best performing styles (transformational/mixed), however, those affected criteria are from the 4 marginally affected criteria based on in chapter 4.2.4.

Considering the preceding facts, we can claim that the research strong evidence supporting the hypothesis H2, indicating that it is valid, and proves the relationship between leadership style and team effectiveness.

Switching from “the most common” style discussed by Q2, to “the most effective” questioned by “ Q3: What is the relationship between leadership style and team performance of EMVTs?”. This question shall be answered through the results of the quantitative results as well, focusing especially on the three main leadership styles, with addition of transformational-transactional mixed leadership. Besides, the answer shall only consider the effectiveness criteria which proved to be affected by leadership styles, as indicated in chapter 4.2.4. For that purpose, both strongly influenced and marginally influenced criteria will be considered (7 aspects). The three remaining criteria which proved to be unrelated to team leadership through ANOVA test shall be neglected.

We can notice that both of the most common leadership styles as concluded in the Q2 answer, are also the most effective styles in regard to almost all criteria, except for Team spirit and Organization support, which also proved to have a marginal link to leadership styles.

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Figure 11: Impact of Leadership Styles on Team Effectiveness Criteria

It can be indicated that mixed leadership slightly outperforms transformational leadership in regard to “motivating” the team i.e. employee’s efforts recognition, sense of contribution, team alignment with employee’s interest and satisfaction with learning opportunities offered within the team. On the other hand, transformational leadership style slightly outperformed mixed leadership style in regard to shared goals i.e. shared understanding and clear plan of team goals and clear understanding of how to achieve them, and coordination i.e. reasonable distribution of tasks, availability of clear work plan, clear definition of roles within the team and regular internal exchange on accomplishments and challenges

Regarding the marginally affected effectiveness aspects, we can see that transactional leadership outperforms mixed leadership on communication i.e. using a consistent communication standard, conducting effective meetings, using common vocabulary and using asynchronous communication, and attention to results i.e. timely and high quality output, reviewing output gaps regularly, seeking and providing feedback from and to other team members about the quality of member’s output to support improvement.

It can be also noticed that transactional style has outperformed all other team leadership styles in two aspects, which are organizational support i.e. organizational policies regarding remote and hybrid work, availability of effective IT tools and access to needed information to accomplish tasks, and team spirit i.e. team cohesivity, collaborative team atmosphere, members mutual support, mutual encouragement and recognition.

From answering Q3, it can be concluded that the performance of EMVT has a direct link to the applied leadership style, which can influence the different aspects of effectiveness positively or negatively which provides strong evidence supporting the hypothesis H3, indicating that it is valid, and proves that improving EMVT team performance is possible when applying certain leadership styles (transformational leadership) or a mix between styles (mixed transformational-transactional).

5 Conclusion and Limitations

5.1 Conclusion

Remote, Virtual or hybrid work modes have gained a great popularity in this decade after the successful implementation during the lockdown caused by COVID-19. Many enterprises have recognized various opportunities in such working arrangement such as cost reductions, wider talent pool, employee’s flexibility, higher employee’s satisfaction and an overall competitive advantage for the company. Due to the nature of such work teams working which combines mostly members from different cultures, sometimes geographically dispersed in various time zones, they have special characteristics such as geographical, temporal and perceived distance, socio-cultural differences and contrasts in work cultures. Those characteristics beside as factors such as the degree of complication of the task and the effectiveness of leadership can cause difficulties managing those teams.

Taking engineering as example of a complex task type for multinational virtual teams, it adds further layer of challenge to leadership. Managing engineering project requirements, architecture, design, implementation and verification is by itself a complex process while the final project’s success depends crucially on the success of each of these dependent processes. Besides, technical interdependencies may take place which require a high degree of communication. Additionally, difference in engineering education systems, or different problemsolving analysis methods which vary from a country to another. A huge challenge which can also take please is the difference in standards and regulations between different countries or regions. This deviation can cause discrepancies in the outcomes if it is not clearly processed and managed on the team level.

In such uncertain managerial circumstances, leadership is the magic word which decides the destiny of the team. A proper leadership style will therefore be a main driver for a high performing team. A transactional leadership style focuses mainly on contingent rewards and punishment to set a system between the leader and the team. Rewards and punishments are based on the member performance and aim to show appreciation or to fix the employee’s output accordingly. On the other hand, transformational leaders create a connection with team members to increase integrity and motivation within the team. They apply ideal influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual simulation and individualized consideration to successfully leader their teams. Additionally, there are Laissez faire and passive avoidant leaders, who prefer to have no interference or influence on the team members, avoid taking responsibility and have no or minimal interactions with their subordinates. While both Laissez faire and passive avoidant overlap, the first is seen to be a strategic leadership choice in certain environments (e.g., R&D teams), while passive-avoidant leadership is typically seen as problematic and characterized by neglect and lack of responsibility.

In order to understand how leadership style have an impact on team performance, and if a certain leadership style can actually improve the effectiveness of multinational engineering virtual teams, quantitative research was conducted through a questionnaire which consists of 77 questions dedicated to investigating applied leadership style and team effectiveness in each respondent’s team. The questionnaire gained 53 responses, in which only 49 of them were valid. The reliability of the questionnaire was investigated through Cronbach’ Alpha and scored 0.87 and 0.96 for the first and second questionnaire parts respectively. The research sample has around 88% of participants who have 6+ years of experience and consists greatly with males (92%) with the majority being born between 1984 and 1990 (90%). The leadership style was assigned to participants based on which style (transformational/transactional/PA-Laissez Faire) has more points based on the questionnaire results. If two or more styles have similar points, then the style is distinguished as “mixed”. It was found that the highest styles between the participants are Mixed Transformational-Transactional styles (39%) and Transformational (35%). It was also found that leadership style has a strong influence on 3 team effectiveness aspects (Shared Goals, Coordination and Motivation), marginal influence on 4 aspects (Team Spirit, Attention to Results, Communication and Organization Support) and no influence on 3 aspects (Adaptability, Psychological Safety and Coping with remote conditions). It was also found that Transformational Leadership Style is the one with the biggest impact on performance together with Mixed Transformational-Transactional. For the 3 strongly influenced team effectiveness aspects, it transformational leadership marginally outperforms for both Shared Goals and Coordination, on the other hand, the mixed style outperforms in providing “Motivation” to the team members. Regarding the marginally influenced aspects, Transformational Style outperforms the mixed style for all of the aspects. However, Transactional Leadership have the best score in regard to Organizational Support and Team Spirit. The research proved with strong evidence the hypothesis H1, indicating that it is valid, and proves the uniqueness of EMVTs, also provided strong evidence supporting the hypothesis H2, indicating that it is valid, and proves the relationship between leadership style and team effectiveness Finally, proved validity of hypothesis H3 and proved that improving EMVT team performance is possible when applying certain leadership styles (transformational leadership) or a mix between styles (mixed transformational-transactional).

5.2 Managerial Implications

Regarding Team Management in Multinational Virtual Teams (EMVTs), the research suggests applying cultural sensitivity due to the diverse backgrounds of team members. EMVTs leaders should be culturally sensitive and aware of sociocultural differences. This can help in managing conflicts and improving team cohesion and thus team effectiveness. Besides, effective communication is crucial, especially in geographically dispersed teams. Leaders should establish clear communication channels and protocols to ensure that all team members are on the same page.

With respect to Leadership Style Selection, Transformational Leadership style has the most significant impact on team effectiveness, particularly in achieving shared goals and coordination. Leaders should focus on inspiring and motivating their teams, fostering a strong sense of purpose and commitment. Additionally, the combination of Transformational-Transactional Leadership proved to be effective in motivating team members. Leaders can blend transformational elements with transactional rewards and punishments to enhance overall team performance. However, further investigation of this mixed style is required, to identify in the nature of this style in regard to which leadership components to be mixed, and the application, which means when and how should it be applied. Investing in training programs shall help organizations emphasizing transformational and mixed leadership styles. This can help in nurturing leaders who can effectively manage multinational virtual teams.

5.3 Research Limitations

One limitation about this thesis is related to the instrument used to evaluate team effectiveness, which is the Big Five Model. According to (Dings0yr and Dyba, 2012) the model framework of evaluating team effectiveness doesn’t focus on the dynamics of self-managing teams, which makes it unsuitable for Laissez-Faire leadership style. In other words, the effectiveness results of Laissez-Faire leadership style obtained by the empirical research of this thesis could be undervalued. However, it was decided to use the Big Five model as it proved its ability to evaluate engineering teams’ effectiveness.

Another limitation of the thesis is regarding the sample researched. Firstly, the number of participants is relatively small. Therefore, the least popular leadership styles (transactional and Laissez faire) have very few participants representing them, which may not provide a sufficient base to evaluate those styles. Additionally, the majority of the participants are males with about 92%. This makes the sample undiversified and presents only one point of view. It is not known if the research results would differ if it was distributed equally over all of the genders, however, a better-balanced sample shall give a realistic overview on the demographics of the workplace.

Another limitation of the thesis also related to the research sample, which is age of the participants. As shown in Figure 6, we can notice that all of the participants are born after 1980, with 90% born before 1995 and the rest after 1995. That means that the sample doesn’t represent team members who are older than 45 years old (as of 2025). That means that the results of the research are valid for this age group. It is not known if people older than the sample age can have different evaluations of team leadership efforts, or the interpretation of team effectiveness criteria.

5.4 Future Research

The research did not consider mixed leadership styles as an independent style from the beginning of the research, despite the existence of some studies suggesting that such a mix can indeed be recognized as a distinct leadership style. Therefore, a potential future research path can be, the investigation of the dynamic of such mixed style i.e. which components from transformational and transactional style do the mix consist of, does mixing the styles happen on a temporal basis e.g. applying certain style for a certain phase or occasion, or both styles are being mixed in parallel along the time. Finally, what are the best managerial situations where a mixed style shall suit, in order to achieve team and organizational goals.

6 Appendix I: Research Questionnaire

General Questions

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7 Appendix II: Statistical Results and Calculations

7.1.1 Questionnaire Responses: Categorization

7.1.2 Questionnaire Responses: Leadership Style Evaluation

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7.1.3 Questionnaire Results: Team Effectiveness Evaluation

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7.1.4 MANOVA Tests’ results and acceptance/rejection of null hypothesis Done by XLSTAT Software

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7.1.5 ANOVA Tests for Each Effectiveness Criteria and Impact of Leadership Style

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8 Literature

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