Emergent leadership, Gender, and Culture: The Case of Sri Lanka

Organizations are increasingly making use of technology to put together people from different geographic areas to collaborate and communicate in order to accomplish assigned tasks. Such virtual work arrangements are not limited by country borders. These virtual team arrangements require many new work practices including more proactive individual participation - or emergent leadership. While emergent leadership has been studied extensively in North America, much less work has been done in other cultures. In this paper we report the findings from a longitudinal study of emergent leadership behavior in virtual project teams in Sir Lanka with special attention paid to the role of gender. Similar to North American studies we found that technology helped level the playing field for women enabling them to engage in emergent leadership behavior.