Leader’s Social Presence and Work Engagement in Virtual Teams: The Moderating Role of Media Richness

Abstract

The increase of research on remote working and virtual teams in recent decades has been undeniable as the world has been changing into a more virtual one. The Covid-19 pandemic has also forced organizations into virtual teamwork, bringing on issues surrounding employee motivation, considering the substantial amount of insecurity and pressure, which again may negatively influence performance. As such, this research paper will investigate how the role of a leader's social presence can influence work engagement in virtual teams. The research includes responses from 85 leaders and 420 employees from nine different organizations. The results of a multilevel analysis show that both psychological involvement and behavioral engagement have significant relationships with work engagement, but not copresence. Further, we found behavioral engagement to have a significant relationship with media richness. The statistical analysis found no support for a relationship between work engagement and copresence, neither between media richness and psychological involvement or copresence. Although none of the correlations were strong, we believe that this contributes to research on the respective topics and hope that it will inspire more researchers to investigate something that will potentially be very important in the coming years. We have considered limitations and future research, as well as practical and theoretical implications.