Relationship Building and Motivation in Virtual teams - Activity-based analysis on teleconference

Abstract

With the technique development and globalization, international companies rely more and more on virtual teams to carry out short- and long-term projects. It is pretty challenging of leading a virtual team, with the consideration that all the communication happen through emails or over the phone. Teleconference is the focus in this thesis. An activity structure coding is offered to help analyzing pre-collected teleconference recordings with activity-base approach, which gives a better understanding of communication behavior on teleconference. Together with interviews of e-leaders, this thesis presents challenges that leader faces in leading teleconference, leader’s communicative behavior and relationship building in virtual context. The purpose of this study is to examine how is motivation generated from leader’s communicative behavior, and how relationship develops in virtual circumstances.