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Top1. Introduction
The coronavirus diseases (COVID-19) has spread across the world and caused unprecedented challenges to global economic (Anthony Jnr & Abbas Petersen, 2020; García-Vidal, 2020). Due to the government-enforced lockdowns for preventive measures, people need to stay at home and shift their working environment from face-to-face to virtual (Waizenegger et al., 2020; Feitosa & Salas, 2020). In order to deal with turbulent and competitive environments of COVID-19 situation, organisations are more predominantly relying on a virtual team rather than physical teams to solve complicated business problems. Along with this trend, Bekirogullari and Thambusamy (2020) investigated the challenges and possibilities of virtual leadership in small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study further steps ahead on a virtual team setting for better team and individual performance.
For the dynamics between a leader and his/her team members, on the one hand, Weick (2001), Morris et al. (2005), Vera and Rodriguez-Lopez (2004) proposed that it is essential for the leader to be humble who manifest in the willingness to listen, openness to feedback, collaborate, ability to learn, appreciation of others, admitting mistakes with sincere. Humility is also a trait to predict how likely a leader will not take all the credit from the team and respect team success. This will foster a good team climate, generate goodwill, create trust, and win respect. Forbes Human Resources Council (2016) also listed humility as one of the five key traits that should be prioritised when hiring executive-level staffs. On the other hand, team members who express humility can better respond to today’s knowledge-based, creative, and complex work environment. In general, humility raise insights to the organisation due to openness to the new idea, which stimulate thinking and foster innovative solutions to problems that help companies navigate the change and manipulate even in times of turbulence. According to a New York Times’ interview to Laszlo Bock (2014), the Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, humility was one of the key traits that Google is looking for their new recruitment.
Humility is recognised as an essential self-based trait (Tangney, 2002; Peterson and Seligman, 2004). Baumeister’s (1998) proposed that humble individuals who experience through (1) reflexive consciousness, which is related to willingness to see one’s limitations, (2) appreciating others’ strengths and contributions, and (3) teachability, which refers to one’s openness to learning and receptive to others’ feedback. These three dimensions form a comprehensive domain of humility. Humility in past studies mainly associated with leadership behaviors (e.g. Morris, Brotheridge, and Urbanski, 2005; Hackett and Wang, 2012) and was focused on traditional face-to-face context. Here this study investigates humility among members.
The pervasive usage of network access and advent of new technology has facilitated the rapid growth of virtual teams with activities ranging from business, social and educational context. Virtual teams are defined as “groups of geographically and/or organizationally dispersed coworkers that are assembled using a combination of telecommunications and information technologies to accomplish a variety of critical tasks” (Townsend, DeMarie, & Hendrickson, 1998). Based on a study by the Society for Human Resource Management, 66% of multinational organisations use virtual teams. In 2015, 37% of U.S. workers were telecommuting compared to 9% in the 1990s according to the Gallup organisation. Experts estimate that more than 1.3 billion people will work virtually within the next few years. Nowadays, many sizable firms bank on virtual teams to a certain degree (e.g., Breuer & Hüffmeier, 2016). This study looks into the performance of virtual teams’ setting.