| New forms of teamwork necessitate evolving forms of leadership. Defining leadership in the unstructured environments created by digital communications has been elusive, and there is little empirical evidence linking leadership behaviors to team outcomes in purely virtual settings. Virtual settings introduce new obstacles to leadership, while simultaneously affording new opportunities for leadership to emerge among equal status peers. Informed by the two-factor behavioral leadership and structural network theoretical perspectives, this work creates an operational definition of emergent leadership in ad-hoc virtual teams, and empirically tests the effects of emergent leadership on project success.;At the project level, outcome is significantly and negatively impacted by the presence of leadership behaviors that have been traditionally used as strong indicators of emergent leadership. Also, the distribution of leadership attributes among individual collaborators is shown to map favorably to existing taxonomies of leadership behaviors. Finally, the observable leadership behaviors are found to be driven by three principal components which themselves map to coordination, contribution, and community leadership behaviors.;Additionally, for research that intends to utilize publicly available online community data in order to examine the leadership behaviors and communication patterns of virtual teams, the current study creates a blueprint for constructing suitable datasets. |
