VIRTUAL COMMUNICATION, TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP, AND IMPLICIT LEADERSHIP

This research was designed to test the theoretical relationship among personality, implicit leadership, and transformational leadership in a setting devoid of face-to-face communication, which we entitled virtual communication. Specifically, the study was designed to link, by using the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), traits from the 5-factor model of personality (the Big 5) to followers' perception of the leadership style of a virtual leader on the basis of Bass and Avolio's MLQ-5X (1994). A voluntary sample consisted of undergraduate and graduate students from two universities in the south Texas area (N = 306). Respondents to the virtual communication rated Leader 1's communication, which used previously identified transformational language (Salter, Carmody-Bubb, Duncan, & Green, 2007), as significantly more transformational than Leader 2's communication, using words not associated with transformational leaders. Participants who scored high in the Big 5 personality traits of agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extraversion rated the leader as more transformational while those high in neuroticism rated the leader as less transformational.