How Does Leadership Change in Virtual Teams Whose Members Come and Go?

By Petros Chamakiotis, Niki Panteli, and Eeli Saarinen

What happens in a virtual team when membership changes mid-project? Here is how leadership gets ‘reconfigured’ when team members come and go unexpectedly.

Virtual-team leadership¹ is often discussed as though the team itself remains stable. In reality, however, people leave, move to other projects and join teams whose work is already underway.

Beyond onboarding, how can managers integrate new team members while ensuring that the leadership arrangement remains optimal? Drawing on a study of 16 global virtual teams, Petros Chamakiotis, Niki Panteli, and Eeli Saarinen show that adapting leadership to switch, be split or be modified is the way forward.

Changing Membership and Virtual Team Cohesion

The following fictional scenario, which is based on findings from our recently published study², illustrates what such a situation could look like in practice:

“Imagine a virtual team midway through a critical project. Daniel, who has become the team’s informal leader, suddenly leaves, unsettling established relationships and leaving colleagues unsure whom to turn to. His replacement, Maya, joins through a string of emails and group calls in which most colleagues remain invisible and contribute little. The team begins to fragment, and the future of the project is starting to look uncertain…”

To understand how leaders can deal effectively with situations like the one above, we studied a simulation project of 16 global virtual teams involving 204 students from five universities across four countries: Austria, Finland, the UK, and the USA. We then unexpectedly switched 28 of them across teams halfway through the project to simulate a situation of changing membership and gathered their reflections on how the ‘switching’ impacted leadership. We studied individual reflective reports, real-time online observations, and available email and chat records.

Our research shows that effective virtual teams respond not by trying to preserve the old leadership arrangement, but by reconfiguring leadership — allowing different people to step up, adapting how leadership is shared, and using technology in ways that help rebuild continuity and maintain team cohesion. Drawing on our analysis, we present four actionable recommendations for leaders of virtual teams to consider.

Recommendations for Leaders of Virtual Teams

Reassess who leads when membership changes

Virtual team members should not assume that leadership necessarily remains associated with one specific person on the team.

Virtual team members should not assume that leadership necessarily remains associated with one specific person on the team. Our findings revealed three patterns in this regard: leaders who continue, leaders who leave, and newcomers who become leaders shortly after they join their receiving team. In the case of the ‘continuing leader’, the same person continued to lead from the start to the end of the project. In other cases, however, the person who emerged as a leader during the first phase may leave, creating a temporary gap that another existing or incoming member can fill. This means that while the departure of a leader may create a temporary leadership gap, skilled newcomers may bring valuable expertise, contacts and technical knowledge with them, helping to fill the leadership gap — sometimes by leading in a different way or in a different area:

“One new team member showed great involvement […] by immediately asking to take on the task of negotiating with other teams to stay on top of our raw material stock” (Milica, team 7).

Match shared leadership to the work

When membership changed, we observed two forms of shared leadership: simultaneous leadership, in which different people led different aspects of the work at the same time; and successive leadership, in which responsibility passed from one person to another across shifts or time zones. This suggests that organisations should not force a fixed leadership model, but allow expertise, availability and the demands of the work to shape how leadership is shared. Simultaneous leadership is useful when the team needs different forms of expertise at the same time:

“We had two or three leaders over the [whole project] I led the administrative things in our group, while a guy with specialised production knowledge managed a big amount of the decisions” (Derek, team 10).

And successive leadership is useful when leadership coverage must move across shifts, availability or time zones:

“Different people had to take lead during different shifts. During the [handover] between my shift and the one before, it was decided that I would control the simulator screen for my shift. This was new to me. Here, I had to invoice other teams, keep an eye on production, and change operations if need be. I coordinated the team and motivated them to keep selling” (Mark, team 2).

Give newcomers meaningful responsibility from the start

The leadership practices we observed in our analysis show that successful integration of new members involved early task involvement, open and democratic communication, and building on newcomers’ enthusiasm (where evident) and willingness to contribute, fill gaps, and add value in different ways. Established onboarding practices for virtual teams³ remain important, but they should not leave newcomers waiting on the sidelines. Give them a meaningful task from the start and invite them to contribute knowledge, contacts and ideas that the team may not already possess. This can also reveal areas in which the newcomer is well-placed to take the lead:

“One of the newly joined members was more active by himself and tried to make [some] connections […] [he] was quite good in establishing long-term contracts for ordering inventories and this one really helped us to go out of the situation when we could not produce as we did not have units for it” (Kiki, team 15).

Consequently, the key takeaway here is that newcomers should be treated as potential contributors, not just as learners. This is particularly important in short-lived teams, which do not have the luxury of slowly building relationships before meaningful work begins.

Use technology to restore continuity

Leaders should therefore encourage creative combinations of available tools to support different tasks and communication needs.

Technology can either deepen the disruption caused by a membership change or help the team rebuild continuity. In our study, muting, silence and connection problems made disengagement and coordination difficulties worse. By contrast, effective teams combined live calls with shared spreadsheets, written chat and collaborative workspaces to socialise newcomers, share real-time information, enable spontaneity⁴, and overcome language barriers:

• “We used an online collaboration board to store data, but [also] [name of synchronous communication tool] to discuss changes” (Ward, team 10).
• “We also used a new approach: real-time data tracking in a [name of asynchronous communication tool]” (Damian, team 7).
• Technical expertise itself also became a source of leadership: people who knew how to use the team’s digital environment effectively were sometimes the ones who stepped forward to lead:
• “During the time I was on the simulation I found that the leaders were the members with the most knowledge/experience, they were the most confident in terms of operating the software (similar to the last session)” (James, team 11).

Leaders should therefore encourage creative combinations of available tools to support different tasks and communication needs. It is not about ensuring that technology is available, but about knowing that the team members — existing and incoming — know how to use it and are encouraged to do so creatively.

What this Looks Like in Practice: Returning to Daniel and Maya

Returning to the fictional scenario we presented at the outset, we can now see what effective leadership reconfiguration might look like in practice:

“… Instead of trying to replace Daniel like-for-like, the team shares coordination between two existing members across different time zones. Maya is given a meaningful task immediately and invited to lead where her expertise is strongest. The team replaces passive calls with shorter live discussions and a shared workspace that keeps decisions and progress visible. As participation improves, working relationships stabilise and the team gradually regains cohesion.”

Conclusion

When membership changes, managers should not assume that the existing leadership arrangement will still fit. Effective teams make room for leadership to shift, be shared and emerge from new sources of expertise, while using technology to reconnect people rather than deepen disruption. The goal is not to keep leadership fixed, but to keep the team cohesive as leadership is reconfigured.

About the Authors

Petros Chamakiotis is Professor of Technology Management at ESCP Business School in Madrid, Spain, and an Associate Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work in the UK. He researches digital leadership and creativity in human-GenAI and technology-mediated environments, such as virtual and hybrid teams.

Niki Panteli is Professor of Digital Business at Lancaster University Management School, UK, and an Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Her main research interests include digital transformation, digital leadership, virtual teams and virtual collaborations and online communities, and she has published widely on these topics.

Eeli Saarinen is Program Director at Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland. He has extensive experience in simulation development. His work bridges robust research and practical application, with expertise in designing simulations for learning and organisational development. His research interests include examining virtual team leadership, collaboration, and performance.

References

1. Norman, F. (2020). “Managing virtual teams requires devolving leadership”. LSE Business Review, 10 July. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/07/10/managing-virtual-teams-requires-devolving-leadership/

2. Chamakiotis, P., Panteli, N. and Saarinen, E. (in press). “Leadership reconfiguration and the role of technology in global virtual teams with changing membership”. European Journal of Information Systems. https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2026.2670353

3. Chamakiotis, P., Panteli, N. and Pérez-Arechaederra, D. (2025). “Practices for effective onboarding in dynamic Global Virtual Teams”. Organizational Dynamics, 54(1), 101076. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2024.101076

4. Bouisse-Bloigu, I. and Chamakiotis, P. (2026). “Dual-mode e-Leadership: Styles and Responsibilities in Hybrid Virtual Teams”. Information Systems Practice Journal. https://doi.org/10.30280/ISPJ.202604_1.0003