Will Oxytocin Keep the Virtual Office Humming? Even as technology blows companies apart, can the people in them work better together? Yes, says one researcher studying both the brain and the workplace. Maybe people working online will even perform better. "Whether it's online or in an office, the leader's role is to empower individuals to be more successful," says Paul Zak, a professor of economics and director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. If you keep making me successful, I'll want to keep working for you. There are reasons to think the sense of achievement can be built into a virtual team, he says. Mr. Zak gives a lot more hugs than most economists. That is because he has made a specialty of studying the social role of oxytocin, a neurochemical once associated with sex that he says is also critical to trust, empathy and family-like bonds. Oxytocin both fosters and feeds on those behaviors, and can also be created by surmountable challenges, dancing, singing, meditation or marching in a group. It is also created by hugs, which is why Mr. Zak likes giving them to strangers . The economist's studies tell him that oxytocin is produced in high-performing workplaces. "The classic way to get people to do what you want is fear, but people acclimate to that," he says. If you want to keep people on task all the time, you want oxytocin-producing situations. The leadership traits he has identified to produce this include praise, given unexpectedly and in public; transparency in identifying tasks and setting goals; authenticity; effective delegation of work; empathy to others" situations; anticipation of challenges; and autonomy. Most of these may be achievable in an office where people encounter each other on a daily basis, and can bond incidentally. But how easy are they to achieve when the work force is fragmenting? Clearly, the workplace is becoming a virtual environment. Thanks to worldwide bandwidth, cloud computing and mobile devices, we now have teams where some people work at home and some in offices, or in computer-generated environments that straddle the two. Moreover, online work marketplaces like ODesk and Elance have increased the flexibility of companies. Odds are, the workplace will soon be even more virtual. Some management tasks can easily move online, Mr. Zak says. "They'll have to get better at communicating the purpose of things - why they are doing something," he says. It will be important to create a narrative for the virtual team. He imagines workers reading shared biographies of each other, including both work and personal facts, to promote empathy. Communication after a job is completed will be important, so successes can be revisited. Mr. Zak's lab at Claremont is near the Drucker Institute, named for management guru Peter Drucker. Not surprisingly, Mr. Zak is increasing collaborating with the institute. Mr. Drucker, who taught at Claremont for three decades, coined the term "the knowledge society" to describe a world dominated by large information systems. Many of Mr. Drucker's prophecies about how this world will work seem validated by the way cloud computing and mobility are creating more flexible, if disparate, organizations. He talked about corporate "ecosystems" of work, and the need for managers to provide meaning as well as duties to their workers, the same techniques that Mr. Zak says will be necessary online. "People have always said that we are on the squishy side of management," said Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute. Now we're seeing hard science being put behind these things.