Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Virtual project teams are increasingly looked upon as a format for collaboratively solving complex and knowledge-intensive projects, within and between companies as well as in (inter)national non-profit organizations (Finholt, 2002; Perry, 2008). Several different notions of a virtual project team have been used in previous research (Dubé & Paré, 2004). Here we understand it to be an organizational form which is assembled on an as-needed basis for the duration of a project and staffed by two or more members across spatial, temporal, cultural and/or organizational boundaries (Hung et al., 2004; Powell et al., 2004). In these types of projects teams members sporadically meet in person; they communicate via ICT (e.g., e-mail, chat, video-and/or audio-conferencing); they may not have a prior history of working together and may never meet in the future (Hung et al., 2004; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998).
It is broadly acknowledged that a positive level of interpersonal trust between team members within such virtual project teams benefits collaboration and communication (Corbitt et al., 2004; Gambetta, 1988; Jarvenpaa et al., 1998; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998; Jarvenpaa et al., 2004). In contrast, when there is a lack of trust, team members spend considerable time monitoring each other, backing-up or duplicating work, and documenting problems (Wilson, Straus, & McEvily, 2006).
Perceived trustworthiness is an important factor influencing overall interpersonal trust, next to a person’s trust propensity, situational characteristics (e.g., perceived risk, task complexity, social control mechanisms) and the mood of a person at the time of trust formation (Castelfranchi & Falcone, 1999; Riegelsberger, 2005; Rousseau et al., 1998). The extent to which a person (the trustor) trusts a team member (the trustee) to perform adequately is the trustee’s perceived trustworthiness (Hardin, 2002). In face-to-face settings, people base their first impression of each other’s trustworthiness on different types of signals (perceived features of objects or events which can indicate the presence of non-observable properties) received through different routes (Bacharach & Gambetta, 1997; Donath, 2006, 2007). A person can obtain information that signals such properties via direct encounters with another person as well as via reputational information via a connection (Olson & Olson, 2000; Riegelsberger, 2005). Once these signals are used to reveal a certain perceived property of another, they become cues for that property. In mediated settings signals and routes are not abundantly available, but people nevertheless form a rather persistent impression based on any information they collect (Cooper & Bott, 1999; Hancock & Dunham, 2001; Walther, 1995, 2005; Zolin et al., 2002).