Abstract
Background: In an era of always-on connectivity, virtual teams (VT) still struggle with social presence, muted nonverbal cues, and fragmented toolsets—breeding miscommunication, trust deficits, and uneven participation. Conventional 2D platforms ease coordination but rarely resolve these frictions. Metaverse environments promise embodied, synchronous collaboration, yet introduce new risks and dependencies on digitally enacted leadership and user acceptance. Despite growing interest, research remains fragmented, with limited integration of organizational contingencies and individual determinants like personality traits, psychological capital, and technophilia into comprehensive models.
Method: This study examines how individual determinants shape VT leaders’ intentions to use immersive technologies using a scenario-based online experiment simulating metaverse interactions (N = 250). Drawing on technology acceptance and personality theories, we estimate a structural equation model testing personality trait, psychological capital, and technophilia to identify levers for leadership development and resistance mitigation.
Results: Our analysis examines VT leaders’ metaverse use intentions for professional feedback conversations and explains how leaders’ individual determinants shape this workflow-specific intention. Conscientiousness and openness emerge as robust enablers, while optimism—operating partly through technophilia—elevates intention. By contrast, extraversion and neuroticism have no significant effect. Counterintuitively, higher self-efficacy and resilience attenuate adoption, suggesting diminishing returns to self-reliance in structured feedback scenarios.
Conclusion: This study contributes theoretically by demonstrating that VT leaders’ metaverse use intentions for professional feedback conversations is shaped by VT leaders’ individual determinants: conscientiousness and openness increase intention, neuroticism has no influence on it, and—counterintuitively—self-efficacy and resilience decrease it. Practically, the findings equip organizations to tailor determinant-informed onboarding and governance—socially visible collaboration for extraverted leaders, structured workflows for conscientious leaders, and proof-of-value with seamless integration for highly self-efficacious/resilient leaders—enabling more effective adoption and sustained VT performance.
Recommended Citation
Gräf, Miriam and Zöll-Schmidt, Anne, "From Vision to Virtual: How Leaders’ Individual Determinants Drive Metaverse Use Intentions in Virtual Teams" (2026). PAJAIS Preprints (Forthcoming). 69.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais_preprints/69