Virtual teams have become a norm in organizations. According to studies, virtual teams are widely utilized in organizations. In virtual teams, team members are working in different locations separate from each other and they can also be from different organizations. Successful leadership is important in virtual team context. Especially communicational challenges, sustaining trust and follow-up on task progress are common issues in virtual teams. In this thesis the goal was to find out, what people-oriented leadership attributes are considered to impact positively or negatively on individual and team performance. This thesis was conducted as a literature review and as an empirical research. The literature review created the theory that was used as a basis for the empirical research. Four different people-oriented leadership frameworks were studied in the context of the literature review and empirical research. A new framework was created by comparing the four different people-oriented leadership frameworks and grouping similar attributes from each of them into fifteen different leadership themes. The empirical research was conducted with theme based interviews, by interviewing virtual team leaders and team members in Finland. One possible future research topic would be to conduct this research in another country. Based on the empirical research results, people-oriented leadership is an efficient way of leading virtual teams, although there are also some issues related to it. The results indicate that team leaders should put emphasis on how they provide feedback to team members and how to justify changes to their team members, if changes need to be done. The results also indicate that team member motivation increases, project goals are easier understood by team members, trust increases amongst team members, confidence on projects increases and collaboration between team members is better, when people-oriented leadership is used in virtual context. These results suggest that people-oriented leadership helps virtual team leaders to tackle some of the most common issues with virtual teams. Although, based on the results it is possible to argue that people-oriented leadership is an efficient way to lead teams in a virtual environment, virtual team leaders should consider not only utilizing one leadership framework, but to use the best aspects of different people-oriented leadership frameworks.