E-leadership effectiveness in virtual teams: motivating language perspective

Purpose – Virtual teams are becoming a norm in current knowledge-based society and offer a wide range of organizational benefits. This paper aims to investigate the effects of leaders’ motivating language (ML) and feedback approach on virtual team members’ creativity performance. Design/methodology/approach – A 2×2 with pre-test and post-test experimental design was employed to explore how to stimulate virtual team members’ creativity performance using a group decision support system. Findings – The results show that leaders’ ML and feedback approach via e-mail instructions have different interaction effects on members’ creativity and idea generation performance. Team members receiving direction-giving instructions generate more ideas under the demanding feedback approach and team member receiving instructions with more empathetic language exhibit higher creativity performance under the encouraging feedback approach. Research limitations/implications – Shortcomings of virtual environment and leadership remain the major factors influencing such findings. Since the results are also restrained by the functionality of the utilized software tool, tools for virtual teams are recommended to include features that can support the effective use of team leaders’ motivational language. Social implications – Virtual team leaders should provide proper guidance to members using understanding and empathetic wording approach. For task-oriented work, leaders should consider giving more specific instructions and provide constant feedback for completed work. For creative work, leaders should give positive encouragement as feedback or even challenge team members to stimulate their creativity. Additionally, facilitation rules can be set up in advance so that the intelligent agent can timely send out follow-up instructions/feedback. Originality/value – The gained insights beneficially help tool developers for virtual teams build/enhance their tools based on the need of team leaders. This paper also usefully offers important implications regarding how to motivate virtual team members’ creative thinking.