UALR Professor Rolf Wigand and a team of co-authors will present research in Boston and Seattle this month on the effects of shared leadership and virtual teams.

Wigand, UALR’s Distinguished Professor and Maulden-Entergy Chair in the departments of Information Science and Management, is presenting the new reports as part of his multi-year research grant, “Communication, Trust, and Leadership in Virtual Organizations and Teams.” The research is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, Virtual Organization as Sociotechnical Systems.

His coauthors are Julia Gallenkamp and Arnold Picot, both of the University of Munich; Marcus Drescher and Isabell M. Welpe of the Technical University of Munich; and M. Audrey Korsgaard of the University of South Carolina.

The first paper, to be presented Monday, Aug. 6, at the annual conference of the Academy of Management in Boston, is titled “How Does Shared Leadership Affect Team Performance? A Mediational Path over Communication and Trust.”

“In this study, we examine how shared leadership is related to team performance. Our findings contribute to the literature relating team leadership to trust in teams and extends research on how team leadership translates into team performance,” Wigand said.

On Friday, Aug 10, Wigand and his co-authors will present their paper, “Conflict, Value Diversity, and Performance in Virtual Teams,” at the annual Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Seattle.

“While most studies investigating culture in the context of conflict in teams have been using culture dimensions such as collectivism, this study centers on another measurement of culture, namely individual values,” Wigand said. “In this investigation we examine how individual value diversity influences the relationship between team conflict and performance in virtual teams.”