CIFECENTER FOR INTEGRATED FACILITY ENGINEERING Trust in Context: The Development of Interpersonal Trust in Geographically Distributed Work Teams

Increased competition, globalization, and greater availability of communication technologies have lead to an increase in the number of geographically distributed teams. The distribution of these teams creates new contexts for team members that may make trust simultaneously more difficult and more important. In this chapter, we used data from 108 dyads on 12 globally distributed student project teams to compare the development of trust in collocated and distributed dyads. We find evidence that trust is more stable in distributed dyads – it increases less, but it also decreases less than in collocated dyads. Members of distributed dyads appear to retain stable perceptions of their team members’ trustworthiness that, in turn, affect their perceptions of their team members’ performance. In contrast, collocated dyads appear to update their perceptions of trustworthiness based on their perceptions of their team members’ performance. We conclude that the context in which people are working may have a significant impact on the way that trust is developed.