Scaffolding Solutions to Business Problems: Trust Development as a Learning Process

Introduction

Electronically mediated communication promises to continue to grow in overall volume and importance. It is not surprising that the challenge of creating an environments in which virtual teams can flourish and perform effectively has caught attention in both industry and academia. The steady growth of the digital organization with its temporary and distributed work combined with Internet-based tools continuing to become more sophisticated, virtual teams are likely to become more important in the future (Te'eni, 2001). Given that virtual teams interact entirely via computer-based systems, part of the solution to the problem of building a more effective virtual organization might lie in the design of the information systems these teams utilize. Well-designed communication support tools that affect not only the way in which a message is delivered but also the message itself can play a central role in creating an effective virtual team environment. In addition to drawing upon the existing body of literature in IS, one strategy for advancing our understanding of how to facilitate trust development in computer-mediated teams is to draw upon the strategy of scaffolding, which has been used successfully in other disciplines. The theoretical foundations of scaffolding provide a lens though which works previously conceptualized as separate areas, trust development and learning, can be viewed as jointly grappling with the same issue.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the novel perspective that trust formation within groups is inherently a learning process. To illustrate the utility of this perspective we present the results of a study designed to investigate the impact of a system based on this perspective. The study involved the use of a template-driven asynchronous communication support tool designed to promote the antecedents of trust within virtual teams, thus providing useful information to software developers regarding their design of future communication support systems. We next review the theoretical foundations of learning and trust development that underlie the design of a new computer-based communication support system and advance a research model and hypotheses. We then report on an empirical study examining the effectiveness of this new communication tool. The paper concludes with the discussion, implications, limitations and future directions for research in this area.