Leader-Member Relationships in Virtual World Teams

As researchers today seek to understand how virtual worlds may be effectively leveraged for collaborative purposes, exploring the role of leadership in virtual world teams may help shed light on how to manage synchronous and highly interdependent work activities for better team outcomes. Based upon Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory, this study seeks to understand how leadership affects team member performance. We propose that 1) the relationship between a leader and a team member influences the degree to which a team member is allocated and develops resources and 2) to the extent which a team member receives or develops resources, their performance will be enhanced. Through a longitudinal field study of one large virtual world team in the massively-multiplayer online-game Everquest, the findings strongly suggest that the leader-member relationship does impact members' allocation and development of resources. Furthermore, it is the quantity and the type of resources that impacts performance, not the leader-member relationship.