Emergent Leadership and Team Performance in Short-term, Virtual Teams: A Configurational Approach

While considerable research has been conducted on understanding the multiple drivers of informal emergent leadership, less attention has been given to the implications of these emergent leaders for a team’s success. Integrating socioanalytic and functional leadership theory, we developed and tested a multilevel model of antecedents and outcomes of emergent leadership within short-term, virtual teams. We propose that distinct configurations of explicit motives may lead to emergent leadership, and that the resulting leadership motive profiles combine with team processes to promote team success. Hence, we apply a configurational, person-centered perspective to examine what combinations will be sufficient to emerge as a leader and achieve superior team performance. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) at individual and team level (223 individuals in 54 teams), we find two causal paths involving specific motive configurations for emergent leadership, namely a) presence of preference for teamwork combined with presence of goal priority and of power motive (the captain), b) absence of preference for teamwork combined with presence of reliance (the opportunist); and multiple causal paths for superior team performance, either combining different team processes regardless of leadership, or if leadership is needed, then only the captain with different combinations of team processes.