Studying Trust in Virtual Teams

Virtual teams, or geographically distributed groups, are becoming more prevalent in organizations with the development of globalization, interorganizational alliances and ICT development. Virtual teams enable organizations to pool the talents of their own employees in the competitive global environment. As an important factor of virtual teams' success, trust has been a hot topic in the research field of virtual teams. This paper discusses the issue of trust in virtual teams. First we elaborate on the definition of trust, and then we discuss trust in virtual teams. Based on review of research findings concerning virtual team, we propose that trust affects short-term and long-term virtual team in different manners in which the influence of personal relationship grows with time. For short-term virtual team, swift trust or cognition-based trust is important which can be initiated by task-oriented communication or impersonal communications. In contrast, personal relationship established by face-to-face communication is the key for the success of long-term virtual team.