TY  - THES
U1  - Bachelor Thesis
A1  - Auns, Stefanie
T1  - Collaboration in Global Virtual Teams: German Leaders and Chinese Team Members - An empirical study on virtual team collaboration and its implications for leadership behaviour
N2  - Globalisation has significantly shaped the way international organisations operate nowadays. The increased connectivity is continuously raising the number of global virtual teams, connecting employees across borders for project work. With cultural diversity, geographic dispersion and virtuality increasing the complexity of collaboration, the leadership of virtual teams constitutes a critical challenge. Consequently, the topic of leadership and its behavioural implications is progressively gaining businesses’ attention. However, due to limited research in this field, this thesis aims at identifying whether and how leadership behaviour affects virtual team collaboration, specifically between German leaders and Chinese team members.
After outlining behavioural characteristics of virtual leaders as presented by literature, the empirical research focuses on expert interviews with German virtual leaders. Here, a specific focus is put on their perceptions of their Chinese teams, the emerging challenges, their behaviours and the creation of a new virtual culture.
The results show the importance of leadership behaviour in this setting. They emphasise the effect it has on the virtual team members and provide recommendations with regards to behavioural adaptation to master this challenge.
KW  - GVT
KW  - Leadership
KW  - Germany
KW  - China
KW  - Global virtual teams
Y2  - 2019
ER  -