The COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread adoption of virtual teams (VTs), the prevalence of which had already been increasing steadily. However, studies show that VTs often fail to meet their potential, highlighting the centrality of trust to their success. While trust is important at the team member level and the focus of much of the extant research, it also underpins effective virtual leadership. Following a review of VT and trust literatures, research conducted within three global technology companies across Europe, Middle East, and Africa is used to provide insights into trust development in virtual leader-member dyads. These highlight leaders' behaviours that can both demonstrate their own trustworthiness to VT members and their trust of VT members. These behaviours are integrated into a framework for enabling high trust VT leadership which emphasises member-centricity.
TopIntroduction
The advent of Covid-19 forced organizations and employees to adopt remote working and, for many, to work in virtual teams (VTs). This transition was facilitated by the experience of VTs developed over several decades and a large volume of research on their effectiveness. Within this research, scholars identified trust as an essential ingredient of VT success (Breuer et al., 2016; Romeike et al., 2016), research being focused predominantly at the team member level (Breuer et al., 2020; Cheng et al., 2016; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999).
While trust between team members is important, VT leaders have an important role in creating, reinforcing, and maintaining such trust. As such, there is also a need to build trust between leaders and individual team members (Hacker et al., 2019). The importance of this has been highlighted in the trust literature (Ferris et al., 2009; Jawahar et al., 2019; Knoll & Gill, 2011; Sue-Chan et al., 2012). However, studies have generally treated leader-member trust as unidirectional, focusing on members’ trust in leaders, rather than treating trust as mutual or reciprocal (Jawahar et al., 2019; Nienaber et al., 2015). This is problematic as research suggests that trust levels between dyad members are not always mutual (Korsgaard et al., 2015) and the benefits of trust are only realized when the leader and member trust each other (De Jong & Dirks, 2012). In particular, there is limited research regarding how VT leaders effectively develop and maintain relationships with individual members (Liao, 2017); and consequentially we know little of the antecedents to trust development in virtual leader-member dyads. Such knowledge is important as trust may form differently in a virtual environment (Coppola et al., 2004), and by utilizing theories developed for the face-to-face context researchers risk ignoring variables that are particular to the virtual context (Breuer et al., 2020). This chapter therefore considers how leaders demonstrate both their own trustworthiness to members and their trust of members within virtual leader-member dyads, presenting findings from empirical field research conducted by the first author within three global technology companies.
The chapter commences with a consideration of the defining features of VTs and their growth within organizations. It then discusses both the benefits and challenges associated with VTs. Given its centrality to VT leadership effectiveness, trust is then defined, along with the factors which influence trust development and the various levels of trust possible within a dyadic relationship. Next the chapter focuses on the specific role of trust in VT leader-member dyads before introducing the empirical research study which reveals those behaviours which signal a leader’s own trustworthiness to VT members and their trust of these members. Drawing on this, a framework for enabling high trust VT leadership is outlined and discussed highlighting the practical implications for organizations in a post-Covid world.