This research was designed to test the theoretical relationship among personality, implicit leadership, and transformational leadership in a setting devoid of face-to-face communication, which we enti- tled virtual communication. Specifically, the study was designed to link, by using the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), traits from the 5-factor model of personality (the Big 5) to followers’ per- ception of the leadership style of a virtual leader on the basis of Bass and Avolio’s MLQ-5X (1994). A voluntary sample consisted of undergraduate and graduate students from two universities in the south Texas area (N = 306). Respondents to the virtual communication rated Leader 1’s communi- cation, which used previously identified transformational language (Salter, Carmody-Bubb, Duncan, & Green, 2007), as significantly more transformational than Leader 2’s communication, using words not associated with transformational leaders. Participants who scored high in the Big 5 personality traits of agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extraversion rated the leader as more transformational while those high in neuroticism rated the leader as less transformational. VIRTUAL COMMUNICATION, TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP, AND IMPLICIT LEADERSHIP CHARLES SALTER, MARK GREEN, PHYLLIS DUNCAN, ANNE BERRE, AND CHARLES TORTI 6 JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES, Volume 4, Number 2, 2010 ©2010 University of Phoenix View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com • DOI:10.1002/jls.20164 Nelson and Quick (2009) estimate that currently 28 million Americans are working in virtual settings or telecom- muting from home; the San Antonio Business Journal (2008) states that 42% of all companies nationwide offer telecommuting as an alternative form of full-time em- ployment. Additionally, an article by E-learning Yellow Pages (2008) suggests that two-thirds of all traditional universities currently offer online degree programs. Given these high numbers and the rising costs of energy, one would speculate that these trends will increase in the future. Therefore, we took this opportunity to begin the study of leadership from a leader–follower distance