Extraversion and Leadership Emergence: Differences in Virtual and Face-to-Face Teams

This study addresses calls for a better understanding of how team interaction mode (e.g. virtual versus face-to-face) moderates the relationship between member attributes and emergent team processes. We use Mullen's model of salience to explain conflicting predictions and results about the effects of extraversion on leadership emergence in virtual and face-to-face teams. Participants were randomly assigned to 27 four-person teams that met three times, engaging in an iterative decision-making task. Assessments of each member's leadership influence were taken after each meeting, and transcripts were content-coded. Results show that interaction mode has an indirect moderating effect on the relation between extraversion and leadership emergence, fully explained by salience. As such, this study explains an important difference in patterns of leadership emergence between virtual and face-to-face teams.