Abstract:
The quest to increase team performance is a critical focus in organizational studies. Distributed team members can experience constant disruptions while they are on or off work via phone or internet, as members in different time zones have different work schedules. Team members may also suffer from a lack of work-related information due to insufficient interpersonal or technical connections within the team. When team members can no longer perform their given task, because of the problems described above, this is described as hyper- or hypo-connected. Both possibilities can decrease individual job performance, which may lead to a reduction in team performance. This current study addressed this problem from a leadership perspective. Different leadership styles (directive, inspirational, supportive, and adaptive) may have different effects on their followers’ level of autonomy and trust, affecting their level of hyper- or hypo-connectivity and resulting in various performance outcome. Structural equation modelling was performed on archival data of 473 responses from distributed teams of different sizes and locations. The results suggested that directive and adaptive leadership styles had significantly higher relationship with autonomy compared to the other leadership styles, and autonomy partially mediated the impact of leadership styles with hyper- and hypo-connectivity. In addition, directive, adaptive and inspirational leadership styles had significantly higher relationship with trust compared to supportive leadership; and trust fully mediated the relationship of leadership styles with team performance. These finding suggests that directive and adaptive leadership styles were the better styles to have as a leader in distributed teams as their followers were less likely to be hyper- or hypo-connected and in turn, more likely perform highly.
