KU Leuven

If You Guild It, They Will Come: Organizational Leadership in Games

This study examines how leadership emerges and organizational structures form within online gaming groups, challenging the prior literature's reliance on anecdotal evidence and single-game case studies, particularly World of Warcraft.

• The study moves beyond prior anecdotal and single-game (largely World of Warcraft) evidence by interviewing 64 leaders of online gaming organizations across four titles: Counter-Strike (15), League of Legends (17), Guild Wars 2 (16), and RuneScape (16).
• Leaders in the sample had no formal management education or prior business work experience, yet 25 currently hold offline management positions and 14 have participated in professional esports teams as players or coaches.
• Using an inductive approach, the authors derive three ideal-typical organizational structures tied to group stage and size, ranging from groups of five to several hundred members.