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Britni Moore
Professor Flammia
ENC 6297
19 March 2014
An Overview of Trust in Virtual Teams
Background
The unprecedented proliferation of computer technology in the past thirty years has
significantly transformed traditional, physical notions of the workplace, enabling organizations
and their employees to collaborate on the Internet in virtual teams. Virtual teams, increasingly
gaining popularity, have permitted globalization and interorganizational alliances to flourish
worldwide and will continue to replace in-person collaboration at an exponential rate (Zhan and
Xiong 36). By facilitating interaction between geographically and organizationally dispersed
players, organizations are better able to use the talents of their employees in competitive global
markets (36).
In addition to achieving boundary-free collaboration, virtual teams have successfully
proven to save time and travel expenses, offer easier access to experts and management, and
expand markets, but they also pose new, unexplored organizational challenges (Hung, Dennis,
and Robert 1) One of the most significant, but often underestimated factors affecting the overall
success of virtual teams is the amount of trust experienced within these groups. Trust is both an
ethical and a management issue in the workplace, but it can be challenging to garner in the
absence of face-to-face contact. In technologically based environments, where social control
based on authority gives away to self-direction and self-control (1), trust must be quickly
established between disparate, often unacquainted players in order to work towards a common
goal in a short amount of time. To achieve this trust, organizations that desire to stay
competitive in the twenty-first century need to be equipped with both the technological and
organizational competencies required to create viable relationships working within virtual teams.
Significance of Trust in Virtual Teams
Trust, in its broadest organizational sense, can be defined as the willingness to be
vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the action important to the truster, irrespective
of the ability to control the other party (Hung, Dennis, and Robert 2). It begins with the
individual and spreads gradually into expanding social circles from those we are most familiar
with to those with who we have the loosest affiliations (Harrell and Daim 46). According to
Jagiellonian University sociology professor Piotr Sztompka, there are three key dimensions
essential to this basic notion of trust: trust as a relationship, based on the goal of cooperation and

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achieving what cannot be done individually; trust as psychological, manifesting itself as a
personality trait of the truster; and trust as cultural, stemming from familiarity with social context
(Harrell and Daim 46,47). All three factors need to be addressed in order to facilitate functional
working relationships, whether the team is traditional or virtual.
According to Zhan and Xiong, nurturing trust in virtual teams enables the building of
commitment and cohesion, as well as the development of new ideas and new creative ways of
thinking despite diversity, differences of opinions, or engagement conflicts (37), so it is
considered a significant determinate of success in these modern working environments. Because
participants in virtual teams generally lack the face-to-face connections experienced in
traditional workplaces, they are often slow and hesitant to place trust in their digital
collaborators. On-site teams foster more social interaction than virtual ones by the close physical
proximity of their members, where they are able to demonstrate and observe more social cues
than on a computer. These cues may include facial expressions, hand gestures, tone of voice,
immediate feedback, and informal banter.
To mimic the quickly-formed trust developed by on-site teams, coordinators of virtual
collaborations strive to establish a particular form of trust known as swift trust in their teams to
impart a shared sense of cohesion and vision amongst members. Swift trust, a concept developed
for temporary teams who form around a common task with a finite life span, aims to achieve
collective trust around the following four social assumptions: a belief others will care for the task
at hand with goodwill, a willingness to suspend doubt in order to execute task performance, a
willingness to take risk, and a positive expectation of benefits of temporary group activity
(Coppola, Hiltz, and Ritter 95). Although it is only a temporary form of trust, virtual team
members will unlikely be able to contribute confidently and perform at their full potentials
without some form of trusting relationship with their geographically dispersed counterparts
(Yusof and Zakaria 475).
Instilling Trust
If productive digital collaboration ultimately depends on instilling swift trust between
virtual team members, this begs the question of how it can be effectively achieved in the
workplace. Familiarity, shared experiences, reciprocal disclosure, threats and deterrents, fulfilled
promises, and demonstrations of non-vulnerability, Harrell and Daim agree, are the most vital
factors needed for creating solutions that establish trust in virtual teams (47). These crucial
components of trust are generally demonstrated through present actions in the working
environment and are usually not based on personal relationships or past performance as is the
case with traditional, in-person collaborations (47).
One of the most overarching solutions in modern workplace research for achieving
Harrell and Daims standards for trust in online collaborations is for team leaders to implement

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channels of open and clear communication in the planning phases of a project (48). In a
comprehensive study of online classroom instruction, which presented significant insights for
virtual team collaboration, Coppola, Hiltz, and Ritter discovered that instructors with the highest
satisfaction rates from students emphasized early interaction between themselves and classmates,
and between classmates. One of the most positively-ranked professors from the study remarked
on the importance of first introductions and discussions, noting that they help create a
welcoming atmosphere and reinforce the idea that students can work as teams once they get
to know each other (Coppola, Hiltz, and Ritter 99). This early trust formation between team
members and leaders can help individuals within virtual collaborations cope with initial technical
and task uncertainties to gain the confidence necessary to join the virtual working community
(100).
Maintaining task-oriented communication in virtual teams is another effective way for
virtual team leaders to build trust between its members. Clearly delineating roles and
responsibilities for each individual avoids disruption, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings
in the working context (Zhan and Xiong 38) that can inhibit the formation of good natured
collaboration in virtual projects, especially at the early stages of peer-bonding. Feedback should
be maintained during all phases of a project, whether between a superior and a team member, or
between team members themselves to ensure that everyone is making progress towards a shared
goal.
Hung, Dennis, and Robert echo the same sentiment in their research, explaining that
clear role definition and role-based interaction, as well as explicit and tacit understandings
regarding transaction norms, interactional routines, and exchange practices provide another basis
for inferring others behavior in the absence of personal knowledge (5). Keeping differences of
culture in mind, whether geographical or organizational, is especially useful when outlining
responsibilities within a group. When individuals aggregate to work on a project, they each bring
their own way of doing things and these missing commonalities between members can pose new
forms of discontinuities in the virtual team (Yusof and Zakaria 478). What is common in one
culture may not be sustainable, or even acceptable, in a specific virtual environment, so
dispersed team members should be presented with the expectations of the project and the
organization upfront before moving forward as a collective entity (478). Ensuring an explicit
understanding of the tasks at hand helps to ensure that team members trust in their peers abilities
to function as equal collaborators in an online environment.
Conclusion
While physical dividedness may initially inhibit a virtual teams propensity towards ingroup trust, it is not the most significant indicator of success or failure. Instead, it is team
members availability, reliability and sociability in the work place, and flexibility to adapt to new

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situations that determines the amount of trust established within particular virtual teams (Yusof
and Zakaria 478). Whether collaboration is in-person or online, all successful communication
relies on these very human factors. As new technologies become available, especially those that
provide face-to-face interaction, the gap in communication between traditional and computermediated environments will continue to diminish as more of these realistic means of social
interaction become commonplace. Until we can no longer differentiate the difference between
in-person and digital communication, all the current literature on virtual teams encourages
additional research, urging for creative, interdisciplinary solutions to issues of teambuilding and
trust as the practice grows in popularity.

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Works Cited
Coppola, Nancy W., Starr Roxanne Hiltz, and Naomi G. Ritter. Building Trust in Virtual
Teams. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 47.2 (2004): 95-104. Web.
Harrell, Georgina and Tugrul U. Daim. Virtual Teams and the Importance of Building Trust.
IT Professional (2009): 46-49. Web.
Hung, Yu-Ting Caisy, Alan R. Dennis, and Lionel Robert. Virtual Teams: Towards an
Integrative Model of Trust Formation. From the 37th Annual Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences in IEEE Conference Publications (2004): 1-11. Web.
Yusof, Shafiz and Norhayati Zakaria. Exploring the State of Discipline on the Formation of
Swift Trust within Global Virtual Teams. From the 46th Annual Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences in IEEE Conference Publications (2013): 353-362. Web
Zhan, Yihong and Feng Xiong. Studying Trust in Virtual Teams. From the 2nd International
Conference on Future Generation Communication and Networking Symposia in IEEE
Conference Publications (2008): 36-40. Web.