Fostering trust in virtual project teams (Rusman et al, 2010, IJHCS)

Introduction

1. Interpersonal trust is one of the key factors influencing the performance of face-to-face as wel las virtual project teams

2. When little or no trust exists within a team,serious collaboration problems may occur, such as poor decision-making, hampered information exchange, an increase drisk of misunderstandings and mounting personal conflicts (Ha kkinen,2004;Hartman,1999).

3. this trust is frequently fragile and easily damaged

4. an integrative view of the whole trust formation process of project teams is still rare, and comparison with the situation in virtual project teams in order to pinpoint problems in the latter is lacking (Riegelsberger et al.,2004).

5. Virtual teams vary along a number of dimensions, such as team size, degree of geographic dispersion,prior shared  work experience,nature of members’ assignment, cultural diversity (national, organizational and/orprofessional) and expectations of a common future.

6. In this type of virtual team, team members sporadically meet in person, communicate via ICT (e.g.,email,chat,video conferencing),often do not have a prior history of working to gether (Jarvenpaa andLeidner,1998), and may never meet in the future(Hungetal.,2004).

7. when collaboration is between organizations, people are less likely to have access to reputational information, which could help them to form a first impression of the trustworthiness of their team mates.

8. Many virtual project teams find collaboration problematic (Ha¨ kkinen, 2004;Trautsch,2003). There are several problems that may been countered.
 First,communication may not be spreade qually in time.
 Second, people may just be exchanging bits of information without building on each other’s knowledge, thus failing to take their group to the level of collaborative knowledge construction.
 A third potential problem is the low frequency and unequal spread of interaction between team members, thus impeding full profit from each person’s personal qualities and expertise. 
 A fourth problem that may occur is ‘flaming’ (onlinename-calling), personal conflicts and enduring misunderstandings between group members.
 Finally,overall group performance could be of low quality,with decision-making processes being hampered, so that the group’s deliverable is of low quality or late.

Trust

9. we define interpersonal trust as: a positive psychological state (cognitive and emotional) of a trustor (person who can trust/distrust) towards a trustee (person who can be trusted/distrusted) comprising of trustor’s positive expectations of the intentions and future behaviour of the trustee, leading to a willingness to display trusting behaviour  in a specific context.

10. An interpersonal trust state both has a cognitive(e.g., grounded in perceived properties of a situation) and emotional dimension(e.g.,feelings of connection to each other), which influence each other.A trust state as such is a complex mix of cognition and emotion,comprising of positive (ornegative) feelings towards that which is trusted (Corritoreetal.,2003) and reflects ‘‘assessments of current cognitive processing and its implications for the goals of the individual’’ (Hampson and Morris,1999), as opposed to for example feelings of ‘fear’ and ‘joy’.

11. The latter are each basic emotions, which not necessarily require cognitive processing and which relate directly to subcortical parts of the brain and physiological reactions.

Trust formation 

12.