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Here in the early days of the 21st century, we are hearing those voices around us, which long for the return of the charismatic, individualistic leaders of earlier times. Where are the so-called “leaders of men,” the giants of politics and industry who can safely show us the way? We used to be able to recognize them more easily; they stood tall, took little heed of other people's opinions, and spoke authoritatively like him-who-is-tobe-obeyed. But somewhere around New Year's 2000 (or was it earlier?), these titans seem to have become less individualistic. Leadership today seems to be more of a combination of great minds rather than any single intellect. We have come to realize that leaders simply do not and cannot stand alone.

In his book, Organizing Genius, Warren Bennis (1997) titles the first chapter “The End of the Great Man” and argues that the day of the individualistic, charismatic leader is now past:

The myth of the triumphant individual is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.... In our society leadership is too often seen as an inherently individual phenomenon. And yet we all know that cooperation and collaboration grow more important every day. A shrinking world in which technological and political complexity increase at an accelerating rate offers fewer and fewer arenas in which individual action suffices. Recognizing this, we talk more and more about the need for teamwork (p. 1).

The vastness and complexity of the task in the new century now requires leaders to see far beyond their own individual perspectives, no matter how wise or impressive they may have seemed. To add to Bennis' technology and political complexity, Moran, Harris and Stripp (1993) add culture, rapid change and the shifting nature of work:

The human family and global business in particular are increasingly intercultural and interdependent. We are in passage from a work culture that conditioned most of us when the Industrial Revolution recast our physical world and reality through mechanization, quantification, and consolidation. We are in transit to a Knowledge Society, dominated by high technology and information processing, a culture marked by mediation (describing and interpreting our world), by simulation and virtual reality (VR), and by circularity (events whipping around us, interacting and shaping experiences). In these circumstances, between epochs, everything we do is cross-cultural and dynamic. (pp. 10–11).

This chapter will focus on what happens to business leadership in an environment like that just described. Clearly the “triumphant individual” is rare, organizational hierarchy is being flattened, team process takes center stage, globalization makes organizations and teams international, and the various electronic communication media become the environment of the new reality. The approach of this chapter will be, first, to examine some of the issues of virtual teams — the challenges, problems and solutions, payoffs, technology, and the array of human, economic, political and even philosophical issues they raise. Secondly, we move to an analysis of three areas of difficulty that face global leadership in the virtual environment: culture, trust and collaboration. As part of this analysis, we suggest strategic approaches for executives to employ in order to solve and preempt some of these problems.

The emergence of “virtual teams” (VT) has become one of the hottest topics in business management literature. And in that literature the subject of leadership comes up often. When it does, however, it is much more likely to discuss middle managers and team members.

What this literature does not talk about much is what goes on with executives in the new virtual environment of global teams. On one hand, Bennis' “triumphant individual” is passes on the other hand, executives are still around and functioning as the top leaders of organizations. Although we shall see that most of the research and writing on virtual teams has been done on teams that operate deeper in the organization, it is nevertheless true that senior leaders of international organizations must also collaborate in a virtual environment. The collective knowledge of executive leadership teams plays itself out in a virtual, mediated environment to set the direction and strategy of the entire enterprise. These executive virtual teams may find the challenges of time and space to be even greater, with attendant increases in peril to the organization.

We want to look carefully and strategically at the needs and challenges facing executive teams who utilize electronic media to run international businesses from widely scattered locations. Our concern is with the international virtual executive team (IVET).