Big Five Personality Factors and Leader Emergence in Virtual Teams: Relationships With Team Trustworthiness, Member Performance Contributions, and Team Performance

Using a sample of 243 undergraduate business students assigned to 71 virtual teams, this study explored the relationships between the Big Five personality factors, leader emergence, team trustworthiness, peer rated member performance contributions, and team performance. As predicted, agreeableness and conscientiousness were positively related to the task- and social-oriented dimensions of leader emergence, respectively. Contrary to expectations, emotional stability was not related to either dimension of leadership emergence. Evidence of the predicted relationships between emergent leadership and peer ratings of member contributions to team performance was obtained for task- but not social-oriented behaviors. At the team level, aggregated social-oriented leadership behaviors predicted aggregate perceptions of team trustworthiness. Only aggregated task-oriented emergent leadership behaviors predicted virtual team performance.