Reimagining e-leadership for reconfigured virtual teams due to Covid-19.

Driven by an unexpected transition into virtual working worldwide as a result of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, in this paper, we examine the extent to which existing knowledge from the literature on virtual teams (VTs) spanning two decades can be used to inform how leadership can be exercised in the Covid-19 'new normal', involving 'reconfigured' VTs which have both similarities with, and differences from, earlier VTs. Drawing on existing literature on VTs pre-Covid-19, we explore what current (and future) VTs might look like and what this means for leadership in this new context with an emphasis on how leadership, or e-leadership, can be exercised to help the leaders of traditional, physically collocated teams that had to transition into VTs. These new e-leaders need to come to grips with a variety of new challenges in order to create high-performing and sustainable VTs. Following a semi-systematic, state-of-the-art literature review, we: (a) identify key themes and explain with a theoretical model how existing knowledge can lead to new insights for newly transitioned e-leaders; (b) discuss what future information systems (IS) researchers should focus on given the reconfiguration and new characteristics of VTs in the Covid-19 context; and (c) 'translate' the findings of our synthesis of the existing literature into prescriptive advice that can be used to inform practitioners.

Designing and evaluating the acceptability of Realshare: An online support community for teenagers and young adults with cancer.

A participatory action approach was used to design and evaluate the acceptability of the Realshare online community. Pre and post-intervention focus groups were conducted and participants were asked to test out Realshare during two intervention periods: when a facilitator was present and when one was not. Focus group data and forum messages were thematically analysed. The themes identified related to participants' website design requirements, how they used the community and the evaluation of Realshare after having used it. Amendments were made to Realshare throughout the project. Realshare is available to young oncology patients in the South West of England.

User perspective of DITIS: virtual collaborative teams for home-healthcare.

DITIS supports home-care by offering wireless health care services for chronic illnesses. The main service is the dynamic creation, management and co-ordination of virtual collaborative healthcare teams for the continuous treatment of the patient at home, independently of the physical location of the team's members (or the patient). For each patient a flexible (dynamic) virtual medical team is provided, made up from visiting home-care nurses, doctors, and other health care professionals, responsible for each case. This virtual team is able to provide dedicated, personalized and private service to the home residing patient on a need based and timely fashion, under the direction of the treating specialist, without the necessity to move the patient from his home, thus making better use of the scarce and expensive medical professionals and scarce hospital beds, irrespective of geographic or organisational barriers. DITIS uses a number of state of the art technologies which are seamlessly put together, such as collaboration and personalization via mobile agents, access to medical data from anywhere and any time via a variety of mobile devices and a variety of protocols (i.e., WAP, HTML) and continuous connectivity via new communication technologies such as ADSL and GPRS, and soon UMTS. All the technologies are selected for platform independence.