  We conduct the first comprehensive study of the behavioral factors which
predict leader emergence within open source software (OSS) virtual teams. We
leverage the full history of developers' interactions with their teammates and
projects at github.com between January 2010 and April 2017 (representing about
133 million interactions) to establish that - contrary to a common narrative
describing open source as a pure "technical meritocracy" - developers'
communication abilities and community building skills are significant
predictors of whether they emerge as team leaders. Inspirational communication
therefore appears as central to the process of leader emergence in virtual
teams, even in a setting like OSS, where technical contributions have often
been conceptualized as the sole pathway to gaining community recognition. Those
results should be of interest to researchers and practitioners theorizing about
OSS in particular and, more generally, leadership in geographically dispersed
virtual teams, as well as to online community managers.
