Graduate Student, School of Management
Ph.D. Candidate
College of Management & Technology
Thesis Title: Emergent Leadership in Global Virtual Teams: A Case Study of Distributed Cognition
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Dr. David Gould (Chair)
Dr. Elizabeth Wilson (Methodologist) |
About
This qualitative descriptive study will focus on the phenomenon of emergent leadership in an extreme virtual team at a multinational retail company, specifically leadership understood through socially-distributed and culturally-mediated cognitive activity. Descriptive qualitative studies, and especially those pertaining to distributed cognition, seek to provide detailed analyses of interactions between human and technology actors and artifacts. The descriptive approach for a study aims to uncover and seek understanding of the who, what, when, where, and how; to lead ultimately to an explanation as to why a phenomenon occurs as it does. From this perspective, the aim of a descriptive study aids a researcher in identifying the emergent patterns in complex adaptive systems. This study chooses to focus on identifying and describing a CAS that takes the form of a virtual team, whose emergent properties in leadership are evident in the way cognition is distributed.
