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As business is becoming more global, virtual teams are getting increasingly prevalent. The purpose of this paper is to examine virtual team effectiveness by taking a deeper look at the Virtual World Teams (VWTs) of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs).

The paper investigates the effects of leaders’ emotional intelligence and transformational leadership on virtual team effectiveness, including three sub-factors of team effectiveness: team performance, viability and team member satisfaction. In addition, the indirect effect of emotional intelligence on team effectiveness via transformational leadership was examined. In total, 500 MMOG players that belonged in virtual world teams participated in the study. Hypotheses were tested through a series of multiple linear regression analyses, and one-way ANOVA tests were used to explore the impact of gender on the key factors of team effectiveness.

The analysis revealed a significant predictive relationship between perceived leader emotional intelligence and virtual team effectiveness sub-factors, mediated by transformational leadership behavior. Further analysis revealed gender differences in players’ perceptions of their leader emotional intelligence, transformational leadership and virtual team effectiveness.

This paper adds to the literature by revealing important predictors of virtual team effectiveness. These findings suggest implications for research and practice in the fields of Human Resources (HR), Human Resource Development (HRD) and training programs for e-leaders. The results of the analysis based on gender differences also have theoretical and managerial implications.

The study provides evidence that transformational leadership mediates the relationship between leaders’ emotional intelligence and team effectiveness in a virtual team.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.