Research on virtual team leadership has largely relied on theories developed for dyadic leader-member relationships or focused on the informal form of authority executed by team members, leaving many questions regarding the role of formal team leaders unanswered. Integrating Bell and Kozlowski’s (2002) and Hill and Bartol’s (2016) theoretical perspectives with the functional leadership framework, I posit that formal team leaders should delegate part of their responsibilities to members and enable them to self-manage. To do so, formal team leaders might need to perform specific guiding and empowering functions. In Study 1, I examine the factor structure of the leadership functions and find support for the model consisting of the guiding and empowering factors. In Study 2, I test the hypotheses in a scenario experiment. The results suggest that the leadership functions are positively associated with participants’ leadership emergence, and the relationship is mediated by psychological empowerment.