Developing Trust in Virtual Teams

Abstract

During the last few years, there has been an increasing acknowledgment of the importance of trust in business interactions within the management and organizational literatures (e.g., Kramer & Tyler, 1996; Mayer, Davis, & Schorman, 1995; Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1999). Trust, as a positive and confident expectation in the behavior of another party (Cook & Wall, 1980; Currall & Judge, 1995), enables cooperation and becomes the means for complexity reduction, even in situations where individuals must act under uncertainty with ambiguous and incomplete information. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the current age of global and digital economy and virtuality (Shepherd, 2004), there has been an overwhelming interest in trust. Motivated by the need to better understand trust in the digital era, this paper views the case of global virtual teams in commercial business organizations.