The Mediating Effect of Interpersonal Trust on Virtual Team's Collaboration

Literature Review

There are several definitions in the literature for virtual teams. Virtual teams have been commonly defined as functioning teams that rely on ICT-mediation that crosses several boundaries (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Kirkman et al., 2002; Peters & Manz, 2007; Ebrahim, Ahmed, & Taha, 2009). It is widely agreed by scholars, that the main element that defines virtual teams is its composition of individuals who communicate and are dispersed across space, time, and/or organizational boundaries (Peñarroja et al., 2015; Huang, 2010). Thus, a working definition of virtual teams is distributed work teams whose members are geographically dispersed and coordinate their work predominantly with electronic information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005).

Duarte and Snyder (2011) identified communication and collaboration as two of the most important factors in teams’ success. Schultze and Orlikowski (2010) noted that the virtual setting has been shown to be a promising and powerful environment for team performance. However, virtual teams, because of distances separating the team members, need to develop ways to create successful collaboration. The availability of e-collaboration tools, such as social networks, wiki, and collaborative sharing files (e.g., Google Docs and Office 365), video conference (e.g., Skype) can contribute to this effort (Hosley, 2010; Kauffmann & Carmi, 2014).