Developing Trust in Virtual Teams

A research project with distributed electronic teams was conducted to examine how virtual temporary teams quickly develop and maintain trust relationships with people that they hardly know, and may never meet again, with the goal of producing interdependent work. We collected data from 14 teams of students from three different universities with the aim of providing a theoretical and empirical explanation of what temporary, distributed teams do to produce trust as a foundation for cooperative work. Our results suggest that high levels of trust were maintained in teams that engaged in continuous and frequent interaction, were more efficient in moving through the phases of the project, focused on the work content of their projects, and achieved sufficient amounts of social penetration during the first part of the project to increase their work effectiveness throughout its conclusion. The implications of trust in virtual teams are discussed.