Leader emergence in an Internet environment

With the progression of technology, particularly the Internet, it is becoming increasingly important for organizations, both business and academic, to effectively use the Internet for research and data collection. In this study, leaderless discussions conducted completely in an Internet environment were used to study how individuals emerged as leaders. The study assessed leaderless discussion variables as well as Internet process variables such as emoticons, web-based initializations, and technical speak as predictors of leader emergence. Traditional leaderless discussion variables were not predictive while many of the Internet process variables were found to have strong positive relationships with leader emergence. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.