| dc.description.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. | en_US |
