Trust and performance in virtual teams and organizations - the influence of psychological, techno-structural, and social factors.
Final Report Abstract
The project highlights important aspects of virtual team work processes and contextual factors. One of the main concepts studied in the project was trust. There are several implications from our studies that were concerned with the antecedents as well as outcomes of trust in team as well as trust in leadership. Our project highlights the importance of communication in teams for the establishment and development of trust. The communication behavior of the leader of a virtual team can significantly impact trust and therefore the performance of the team. The leader’s communication choice (the repertoire, the communication channels used etc.) and his communication with the teams are a critical factor to success. Our project is unique in this context since it focuses on the leader behavior and the leader’s communication within the team which has so far been neglected by studies that mainly focused on the general team communication patterns. Furthermore, the project also highlights the importance of a leader’s behavior when it comes to conflict in virtual teams. The project demonstrates the different impact of conflict on these teams and how they depend on the cultural and personal values of the team members. But most important it shows how leader can in fact effectively manage these conflicts and render them even beneficial to their team performance. Virtual teams are therefore not helpless regarding conflict. Moreover, the project highlights the impact of inspirational leadership in virtual teams on different team related outcomes. It was shown that this type of leadership has a strong influence on them processes and depends on the followers’ personality but also shows a cultural universality. These results on the impact of personal values in the leadership process extend the literature by underpinning the importance of followers’ characteristics on the effectiveness of team management which has so far not been investigated in this context. Another focus of the project is how trust evolves over time. Yet, research on trust mostly takes a static snap show view on trust. This project utilizes the longitudinally obtained behavioral data to create measures for trustworthiness and trusting behavior. The results show that the development of trust follows a curvilinear trend. That is, initially, trust grows strongly. However, over time the growth decelerates until reaching a maximum level. Further, the strength of the relationship between ability and trust seems to change over time. While in the beginning of the existence of a team, ability seems to have weak impact on trust, the relationship becomes stronger over time, and finally levels off. This suggests that team members may need time to draw inference about the other members’ ability. Later on, other factors may become more important after knowing about the team’s ability. Finally, the project investigates the concept of shared leadership. The project provides evidence for an explanatory mechanism: shared leadership fosters performance by positively influencing trust in team which in turn increases performance. The results contribute to the young, but growing literature on shared leadership showing that temporal increases in shared leadership positively relate to increases in trust and performance. The findings suggest that distributing leadership functions among team members helps to strengthen social bonds among team members and better utilize the capabilities inherent in the team. In conclusion, this project advanced research at the intersections of communication, trust, and leadership in virtual teams and provided practical advice on how to communicate and lead teams in order to improve team performance.
Publications
- (2010). Conflict, culture, and performance in virtual teams: Results from a cross-cultural study. Proceedings of the 43nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press
Gallenkamp, J. V., Assmann, J., Drescher, M. A., Picot, A., & Welpe, I. M.
- (2010). Dynamik von Führung, Vertrauen und Konflikt in virtuellen Teams [Dynamics of leadership, trust, and conflict in virtual teams]. Gruppendynamik und Organisationsberatung, 41, 289–303
Gallenkamp, J. V., Picot, A., Welpe, I. M., & Drescher, M. A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11612-010-0129-0) - (2010). MMOGs as emerging opportunities for research on virtual organizations and teams. AMCIS 2010 Proceedings. Paper 335
Assmann, J. Drescher, M. A., Gallenkamp, J. V., Picot, A., Welpe, I. M., & Wigand, R. T.
- The Role of Culture and Personality in the Leadership Process in Virtual Teams (December 6, 2011). ICIS 2011 Proceedings. Paper 2
Gallenkamp, J. V., Picot, A., Welpe, I. M., Wigand, R. T, & Riedl, B.
- (2012). Social network indices as performance predictors in a virtual organization. Fourth International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks (CASoN), 144-149
Wigand, R. T., Agarwal, N., Osesina, O. I., Hering, W., Korsgaard, M. A., Picot, A., & Drescher, M. A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1109/CASoN.2012.6412393) - (2012). Why would I trust them? How relational climates moderate the effect of social cynicism on team trust. Best Paper Proceedings of the 2012 Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Tumasjan, A. & Strobel, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2012.220)
