Leadership is a central challenge in virtual teams. Particularly, all kinds of direct control are difficult when team managers are not at the same location as the team members. As a consequence, delegative management principles are considered that shift parts of classic managerial functions to the team members. However, team members only accept and fulfill such managerial functions when they are motivated and identify with the team and its goals, which is again more difficult to achieve in virtual teams. Next, empirical results on three leadership approaches are summarized that differ in the degree of autonomy of the team members: Electronic monitoring as an attempt to realize directive leadership over distance, management by objectives (MBO) as an example for delegative leadership principles, and self-managing teams as an example for rather autonomous teamwork.