Communication and trust in Global Virtual Team(Jarvenpaa and Leinder, 1999,OR)

Trust in Teams

1. Cummings and Bromiley (1996) maintain that a person trusts a group when that person believes that the group "(a) makes a good-faith effort to behave in accordance with any commitments both explicit or implicit, (b) is honest in whatever negotiations preceded such commitments, and (c) does not take excessive advantage of another even when the opportunity is available" (p. 303).

2. Several factors, such as shared social norms, repeated interactions, and shared experiences, have been suggested to facilitate the development of trust (Bradach and Eccles 1988, Mayer et al. 1995, Lewis and Weigert 1985).

3. Another factor asserted to promote trust and cooperation is the anticipation of future association (Powell 1990).

4. Such anticipation of future association is higher among group members who are collocated than among physically dispersed members. Colocation, or physical proximity more generally, is said to reinforce social similarity, shared values, and expectations, and to increase the immediacy of threats from failing to meet commitments (Latane et al. 1995). Furthermore, face-to-face encounters are considered irreplaceable for both building trust and repairing shattered trust (Nohria and Eccles 1992, O'Hara- Devereaux and Johansen 1994)

Swift Trust in Temporary Teams

5. The theory of swift trust suggests that the research questions of whether trust is possible and how it might be developed via communication behavior may be the wrong questions to ask. The more appropriate questions might be: from where is trust imported to the global virtual team and how is trust maintained via electronic communication?

6. Meyerson et al. (1996) developed the concept of "swift" trust for temporary teams whose existence, like those of global virtual teams, is formed around a common task with a finite life span. Such teams consist of members with diverse skills, a limited history of working together, and little prospect of working together again in the future.

7. After the team has begun to interact, trust is maintained by a "highly active, proactive, enthusiastic, generative style of action" (Meyerson et al. 1996, p. 180). High lev- els of action have also been shown to be associated with high-performing teams (Iacono and Weisband 1997). Action strengthens trust in a self-fulfilling fashion: action will maintain members' confidence that the team is able to manage the uncertainty, risk, and points of vulnerability, yet the conveyance of action has as a requisite the communication of individual activities.

8. Developed to explain behavior in temporary teams such as film crews, theater and architectural groups, presidential commissions, senate select committees, and cockpit crews (Meyerson et al. 1996), the theory of swift trust assumes clear role divisions among members who have well-defined specialties.

9. Inconsistent role behavior and "blurring" of roles erode trust. Moreover, the theory seems to presuppose that participants come from many different organizations, have periodic face-to-face meetings, and report to a single individual.

10. By contrast, in global virtual teams, members remain in different locations and often are accountable to different individuals. Such teams are assembled less on the basis of members' specific roles and more on their knowledge differences, partially related to the geographic location of the individual who provides the team with greater knowledge of that environment. These differences may have significant implications for swift trust.