Leading Remote and Virtual Teams: A Real Challenge for Leaders and Entrepreneurs

The objective of this theoretical research paper is to study and analyze in depth the main challenges that leaders and entrepreneurs face in their management of remote and virtual employees. The significance of the study is due to the fact that the growing trend of remote and virtual jobs as a non-traditional means for employment has been strongly increasing in many countries due to its many benefits for both the employer and the employee, but on the other hand, there remain several challenges and problems for leaders and entrepreneurs to solve in their management of remote and virtual teams. The research question therefore focuses on the following: What are the different challenges that leaders and entrepreneurs face while managing remote and virtual teams? And how can they manage these challenges? Some of these challenges cited in the literature are related to the feeling of isolation of remote employees or lack of managerial control over them, lack of emotional and technical support for remote employees and their detachment from corporate culture and integration, besides disrupting the remote workers' work/life balance. The study classifies these challenges into six types. Some of these challenges were related to the employee's behavioural and competency aspect, the organization itself, the management side, technical part, human resources and legislative aspects. This study tackles in depth the challenge related to the employee's behavioural and competency aspect resulting from remote employee's low motivation and morale besides their lack of competency skills. It discusses the remote situational leader and the remote transformational leader in their strategies and tools to deal with the employee's behavioural and competency aspect. The data for the study was collected mainly from secondary data besides face to face interview with some government and business executives to get some primitive data on the challenges related to the legislative aspect. The study revealed the different strategies, tools and skills for both the situational and transformational leaders to manage the challenge related to employee's behavioural and competency aspect.