Managerial competencies and skills in virtual teams of matrix organizations : A correlation analysis on virtual team performance

Abstract: Over the last decades, there is a constant experimentation on new organizational models and structures by many international companies aiming to overcome the difficulties of a highly competitive global market and satisfy the needs of the customers 24/7. As such, the companies have commonly adopted virtual team strategies using also the technological advancements. In order to optimally use their resources, they have also used matrix organizational structures. In such complex and demanding organizational models, the virtual managers face a lot of challenges in order to effectively lead their teams. Therefore, the required managerial competencies and skills related to an effective team performance are of great scientific interest. The objective of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, this thesis aims to examine how managerial competencies of a virtual manager in matrix organizations influence the performance of a team and what the most important skills of these competencies are. Secondly, it aims to identify the managerial skills that a virtual functional manager and a virtual project leader need in order to effectively manage their teams and compare these skillsets. This study adapts a survey strategy with the use of an online questionnaire and gathers responses from professional engineers that virtually work in matrix organizational schemes mainly based in Sweden and Switzerland. The descriptive analysis of the collected data shows that both type of virtual managers (functional and project) have similar managerial skills which are commonly found in managers working in more traditional organizational models. This is not in line with the findings of our study, since in our analysis we considered the virtuality dimension, for which our results show that it strongly affects the virtual team performance. Therefore, the required managerial competence is formed with skills that are more important in the virtual context than in other traditional models. A second finding is that a virtual functional manager requires different skills compared to the virtual project leader, which suggests that the companies should account for the management role in the hiring process of a specific type of virtual manager. A future research on virtual teams in matrix organizations taking into consideration the different levels of virtuality or broader sampling techniques or case studies per industry would be of a great interest.