title: The Impacts of Self-leadership and Shared Leadership to Virtual Team Performance: Thai and US-based Projects
Creators: name: Chandavimol, Komes
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2026

description: Leading virtual teams for achieving high performance cannot be accomplished only by experience since each virtual team has its uniqueness and complexity. Virtual teams often comprises of highly skilled professionals who can work virtually from anywhere with high expectation to resolve complicated problems and provide practical solutions within budgets and deadlines. This challenge leads to a shift in approach to leadership that needs to be revisited by academic professionals regarding leading teams as well as influencing members with a response to raised organizational expectation. The role of leadership has limited with virtual technologies, which a virtual leader cannot use many traditional leadership tools to manage team members in non-virtual teams. Moreover, a virtual team leader may not have the specialized skill of the virtual team member, and each member has their expertise with in-depth technical knowledge. This shifts the role of the leader to a more distributed leadership style which empowers team members and allows individuals to self-manage as well as taking the lead when necessary. The virtual team requires a practical leadership approach to facilitate the sharing of leadership, encouraging an individual to become a self-leader and be effective in the virtual team development process. Although the high-performance virtual team is a challenging task to accomplish and does not guarantee success, the organization still thrives for building an effective entity not only to integrate internal staff regardless of location but also expand to other countries for qualified professionals. This becomes a global virtual team, consisting of highly skilled professionals not being together but working together. This includes the researcher’s organization, where building a virtual team to drive the transformation to a data-driven enterprise. The researcher was responsible for leading a team of high professionals combing expertise from business practice to delivering a new data analytics solution as well as staying ahead of the competitors. This transformation did not only build an effective virtual team as a strategic asset for the organization but also introduced a practical framework on how to build an effective virtual team. As a result, this doctoral thesis focuses on resolving the challenge of a virtual team as well as generating new action knowledge by exploring the two leadership approaches, self-leadership and shared leadership, to enhance virtual team performance. This thesis study consisted of two parts, the quantitative approach and three action research projects. A quantitative approach was conducted to explore the impacts of leadership on the virtual team performance, comparing characteristic, demographics and the based location in Thailand and the US. This quantitative approach explored and confirmed leadership components that could enhance virtual team performance, aiming to the verified leadership framework and recommended leadership actions reflected by the researcher. This connected to the main part of this thesis, the action research, in which the researcher planned and implemented the selected leadership action to intervene in the virtual team process in order to enhance the virtual performance. With the three action and reflection cycles, the researcher connects the theoretical findings with the result in practice, leading to the development of actionable knowledge. During this thesis, the researcher also conducted the thesis action research, which is an independent work of the researcher, writing reflections of the knowledge acquired during the action research. This reflection on reflection, suggested by Coghlan (2019) provides a concrete demonstration of the researcher’s general empirical method and quest for actionable knowledge. Writing the reflection, allowed the researcher to develop a deep, broader understanding of the issues and their context, which in turn is discussed back to the virtual team to verify and generate solid actionable knowledge. This thesis study has contributed to the fields of virtual team leadership and performance by providing a theoretical framework that involves leadership approaches, influencing factors and how to enhance the virtual team’s performance. This framework suggests the influencing factors that could improve the performance in the virtual team. In addition, this framework has been implemented in the action research, which provided actionable knowledge in business practice specifically to the processes of each stage of a virtual team. This could be a guideline for an academic-practitioner to conduct further educational research on virtual team leadership as well as to implement recommended leadership actions into organizational and business practice.