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Virtual teams (VT`s) are teams that use communication technology to work across locational, temporal and relational boundaries to accomplish shared tasks (Martins, Gilson, & Maynard, 2004) which are often complex and requiring expert knowledge (Kirkman & Mathieu, 2005). Particularly engineering industries depend on the efficiency of their knowledge management practices (Sharma & Singh, 2015), enabling knowledge to be created, stored, disseminated, and used efficiently throughout the organization (Huang, Lee & Wang, 1999). This all requires efficient communication practices (Denton, 2012). Virtual expert teams collaborating globally by ICT tools are fairly easy to build; therefore, they offer fast solutions in integrating expert teams across geographical distances and different time zones (Holtzman & Anderberg, 2011; de Jong et al., 2008; Cooper, 2001) to work for a certain project or to work together long term.
While it is common for teams to meet face to face once at the beginning of the project, sometimes VTs never meet physically (Te’eni, Carey & Zhang, 2007). Lack of face to face interaction typically poses additional challenges to communication and development of trust (Zigurs, 2003; Holste & Fields, 2010). Effective communication is needed in securing continuous functioning and information flow about current issues, future changes and new goals.
Trust plays a central role in the effective functioning of virtual teams (Jarvenpaa, Shaw & Staples, 2004; Zigurs, 2003), and it has been thoroughly examined in previous research (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Jarvenpaa et al., 2004; Drouin, Bourgault & Gervais.,2010; Dirks & Ferrin, 2001; Bergiel et al., 2013; Malhotra, Majchrzak, & Rosen, 2007; Dennis, Meola & Hall, 2013; Holste & Fields, 2010; Mitchell & Zigurs, 2009; Peters & Manz, 2007; Chen, Wu, Ma, & Knight, 2011). However the interactive effects of trust (Dirks & Ferrin; Brahm & Kunze, 2012), the role and impact of organizational training and support systems´ impact on virtual teams (Drouin et al., 2010; Vanhala & Ahteela, 2011) still need further studies. Trust is essential to all relationships including organisational ones and it is all based on communication—how, when and what you are communicating (Denton, 2012). Bottom line is that trust is necessary for sharing knowledge between individuals (e.g. Anantatmula & Kanungo, 2010; Bergiel et al., 2013; Malhotra et al., 2007; Dennis et al., 2013; Holste & Fields, 2010; Mitchell & Zigurs, 2009; Peters & Manz, 2007; Chen et al., 2011). In research there are controversial results in trust, which requires further studies in order to achieve theoretically grounded understanding (Martins et al., 2004; Seppänen, 2014). It has been previously claimed that virtual teams cannot transmit rich information; however, recent studies have shown that virtual communication can be rich if promoted by high level of trust or strong ties among team members (Harwick et al., 2013; Lohikoski et al., 2014). Hence, understanding trust in different contexts is important not only theoretically, but also in practice (Jarvenpaa et al., 2004).