Changing digital age in the wake of COVID-19 : how does humility impact on virtual leaderless teams?

Abstract

Virtual teams play a crucial role in today’s knowledge-based organisation for overcoming challenges in our dynamic world, especially in the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teams play a key role in today’s knowledge-based organization for overcoming challenges in our dynamic world. Drawing on social information processing theory, this study explores the effect of members’ humility and team environment within a leaderless team mainly based on virtual platforms. Their impacts on shared leadership, relationship conflict and team and individual performance were investigated. Surveying 219 students forming 61 virtual leaderless teams, our findings showed that a high level of humility and a positive team environment can help to improve shared leadership within a team, which contributes to team performance. Moreover, both humility and team environment have a negative relationship with relationship conflict, which depressed both team and individual performance. Our analysis also indicated that humility positively interacts with team environment on shared leadership.