Trusting Relationships between Individuals

So far, this chapter has discussed the trusting relationship between organizations and organizations, and between individuals and organizations. This section focuses on inter-personal trust relations and discusses the case of individual-to-individual trust. Trust at this level is vital in a digital world where there is an increasing use of virtual teams.

Virtual teams consist of a collection of geographically dispersed individuals who work on a joint project or common tasks and communicate electronically (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998). For example, Lipnack and Stamps (1997, p. 7) define a virtual team as:

"… a group of people who interact through inter-dependent tasks guided by a common purpose [that] works across space, time, and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technologies."

Indeed, virtual teams have been presented in the popular literature as a communication-intensive and a computer-mediated linked type of group that promises flexibility and responsiveness to the firm by shifting the work to an as-needed basis wherever the knowledge and skills reside.

In order to function, virtual teams require the presence, or more accurately the telepresence, of individuals—the virtual workers. According to Steuer (1992), telepresence is the experience of presence in an environment by means of a computer-mediated communication. Rethinking virtual teams as a group of individuals who experience telepresence contributes to a better articulation of virtuality since this specifies the unit of analysis as being the individual. Such a view is important in studies on trust in the digital era, as it shifts the locus of attention from the technological enabling role in the organizational experience to the individual, and how the individual perceives his/her role when interacting in the digital era and his/her relations with other virtual team members. Clearly, virtual teams are effective not only because of the technology dimension nor as a result of organizations wanting to extend their boundaries, but most importantly because individuals (as members, partners, or clients of such organizations) are able to trust, and thus interact and work together in virtual, non-traditional environments.

In a collocated, traditional environment, trust is often secured by community, custom, personal relationship, and kinship. In virtual, non-traditional environments, however, there are fewer opportunities for individuals to share experience and reciprocal disclosure, which are seen as sources of personal trust. Nevertheless, familiarity with other people has also been identified as an important antecedent of trust development in virtual teams. According to Handy (1995), for trust to develop in virtual environments, there is a need for constant face-to-face communication. As he puts it, "Paradoxically, the more virtual an organization becomes, the more its people need to meet in person" (Handy, 1995, p. 46). This view has also been reinforced by Lipnack and Stamps (1997, p. 226): "If you can drop by someone's office, see first-hand examples of prior work, and talk with other colleagues, you can more easily evaluate their proficiency."

Nandhakumar's and Baskerville's (2001) study, discussed earlier, shows that individuals in organizations actively seek to establish personalized trust relationships with each other rather than relying on impersonal trust in organizational properties for continuous working. They demonstrate that individuals deliberately cultivated face-to-face relationships to establish personalized trust in online interactions. Individuals perceive that trust, based on organization, as not providing emotional satisfaction and seek to establish trust relationships through face-to-face encounters. Although the firm invested over $20 million to provide virtual teamworking technologies, the electronic relationship did not enable a personal trust relationship between team members.

Even if trust relationships are established, Nandhakumar and Baskerville claim that in the absence of collocation, the individuals would find it difficult to maintain them. They notice that members of the management teams often organized social events where managers can get together to "have a real good drink and a good meal and a good social chat at length" to prevent the relationship from "sliding." Socialization processes enable individuals to get behind the 'official activities' and to participate in activities happening at the 'backstage' (Goffman, 1990), where individuals exchange and share feelings and emotions. Such involvement helps individuals to develop attitudes towards the other as a trustworthy party. Again the electronic interactions and the resulting telepresence are seen as inadequate for providing access to the 'backstage' activities.

Individual-to-individual trust may not be developed in virtual and collocated groups in quite similar ways. Interpersonal trust relationships need to be actively nurtured and continuously renewed by individuals opening out to others and allowing access to backstage activities. For virtual teams to be effective, in addition to providing efficient IT, individuals should be able to trust and work together in virtual environments.

In a recent study on global virtual teams, Tucker and Panteli (2003) found support for the need of face-to-face interaction. However, the opportunities to meet face-to-face have been severely limited by economic pressures and more recently by terrorist attacks. Under these circumstances, those virtual teams that work well tend to undertake regular communications via synchronous, 'live' communication technologies such as telephone and Microsoft NetMeeting. Participants confirmed that synchronous media offered more feedback and therefore facilitated understanding more effectively than asynchronous technologies such as voicemail and e-mail. The use of asynchronous technologies was, however, regularly used for documenting and recording agreements and providing brief, simple updates to work progress. The teams that worked well also included a social and fun element in their interactions that appeared to help in creating a stronger shared social context.

Further, power is an important contextual factor that affects trust (Hart & Saunders, 1997) in that it suggests the existence of a unilateral dependency or an imbalanced relationship (Allen, Colligan, Finnie, & Kern, 2000). In considering power within virtual teams there is an increasing recognition in the literature that knowledge is power and that teams are often formed to create knowledge through combination and exchange. Within virtual teams, the team member with power at any given time is the one with the most relevant knowledge. The study by Tucker and Panteli (2003) finds that in high-trust teams, power differentials do not disappear; rather, power shifts from one member to another throughout the lifecycle of a project depending on the stage and requirement of each stage.