Exploring the effects of trust,task interdependence and virtualness on knowledge sharing in teams

The sharing of knowledge within teams is critical to team functioning. However, working with team members who are in different locations (i.e. in virtual teams) may introduce communication challenges and reduce opportunities for rich interactions, potentially affecting knowledge sharing and its outcomes. Therefore, using questionnaire‐based data, this study examined the potential effects of different aspects of virtuality on a knowledge‐sharing model. Social exchange theory was used to develop a model relating trust to knowledge sharing and knowledge sharing to team effectiveness. The moderating effects of virtuality and task interdependence on these relationships were examined. A strong positive relationship was found between trust and knowledge sharing for all types of teams (local, hybrid and distributed), but the relationship was stronger when task interdependence was low, supporting the position that trust is more critical in weak structural situations. Knowledge sharing was positively associated with team effectiveness outcomes; however, this relationship was moderated by team imbalance and hybrid structures, such that the relationship between sharing and effectiveness was weaker. Organizations should therefore avoid creating unbalanced or hybrid virtual teams.     

Working Together Apart? Building a Knowledge‐Sharing Culture for Global Virtual Teams

A new impetus for greater knowledge‐sharing among team members needs to be emphasized due to the emergence of a significant new form of working known as ‘global virtual teams’. As information and communication technologies permeate every aspect of organizational life and impact the way teams communicate, work and structure relationships, global virtual teams require innovative communication and learning capabilities for different team members to effectively work together across cultural, organizational and geographical boundaries. Whereas information technology‐facilitated communication processes rely on technologically advanced systems to succeed, the ability to create a knowledge‐sharing culture within a global virtual team rests on the existence (and maintenance) of intra‐team respect, mutual trust, reciprocity and positive individual and group relationships. Thus, some of the inherent questions we address in our paper are: (1) what are the cross‐cultural challenges faced by global virtual teams?; (2) how do organizations develop a knowledge sharing culture to promote effective organizational learning among culturally‐diverse team members? and; (3) what are some of the practices that can help maximize the performance of global virtual teams? We conclude by examining ways that global virtual teams can be more effectively managed in order to reach their potential in this new interconnected world and put forward suggestions for further research.     

An Exploratory Study of Trust Dynamics in Work-Oriented Virtual Teams

This study explores trust development and maintenance in temporary, work-oriented virtual teams, and examines the effect of trust on communication and cohesiveness. Results suggest that for work-oriented virtual teams formed on a temporary basis, members swiftly develop calculus-based trust in order to assess the outcomes and costs of maintaining team relationships. Members also rely on prior knowledge to determine other members' competence so that they can make predictions about one another's behaviors. Thus, both calculus-based and knowledge-based trust play accentuating roles in the initial development of work-oriented virtual teams. Identification-based trust also develops swiftly initially, but is relatively insignificant compared to the other two types of trust. Finally, initial trust may correlate to both later communication and later cohesiveness .     

Innovative Entrepreneurial Teams: The Give and Take of Trust and Conflict

Entrepreneurship research lacks empirical evidence about interactions between entrepreneurial team members . This paper examines the role of trust ( cognitive and affective ) and conflict ( task and relationship ) on team performance ( effectiveness and efficiency ) of innovative entrepreneurial teams . Data originated from 88 incubator‐based entrepreneurial teams in Austria . Results indicate that cognitive trust is the cornerstone of innovative entrepreneurial team performance . To maximize efficiency , such teams would rely on high cognitive trust and low task conflict . Nonetheless , the guidelines for being effective centre around high cognitive trust coupled with low task and relationship conflict .     

Close Encounters of the Virtual Kind: Agents Simulating Copresence

ABSTRACT

Results of a field study of an open-access collaborative virtual environment in actual use suggested that awareness of others significantly increases the level of presence experienced by participants. Given the importance of copresence, this paper argues that, in the absence of other human collaborators in a collaborative virtual environment, copresence can potentially be simulated using agent technology. A controlled experiment deploying a prototype embodied conversational agent was conducted to investigate the potential of such agents to simulate copresence. This paper briefly introduces the concepts of presence and copresence, summarizes experiences drawn from the field study, reports on the controlled experiment, and discusses its results. Results suggest that even limited copresence as provided by the current prototype agent is sufficient to help users feel presence in the environment.     

Effects of culture,social presence,and group composition on trust in technology‐supported decision‐making groups

This study examines trust in technology‐supported groups from the perspectives of culture, social presence and group composition. Our results demonstrate that, in culturally homogeneous groups, individualism has a negative impact on the level of interpersonal trust; however, in culturally heterogeneous groups consisting of Chinese and U.S. participants, individualism has a positive impact on interpersonal trust among members. There were also significant differences in the level of trust between homogeneous Chinese groups and heterogeneous groups consisting of Chinese and U.S. participants. In addition, the mediating role of communication quality was identified to explain the effect for trust‐of social presence on trust. These findings have important implications on building and communication in global technology‐supported decision‐making groups.     

Group development in virtual teams: An experimental reexamination

Virtual teams are thought to be experienced differently and to have poor outcomes because there is little or no face-to-face interaction and a tendency for virtual team members to use different communication techniques for forming relationships. However, the expanding use of virtual teams in organizations suggests that virtual teams in real world contexts are able to overcome these barriers and be experienced in much the same way as face-to-face teams. This paper reports the result of an experiment in which virtual teams participated in an exercise where they completed an information-sharing task ten times as a team. The results suggest that, contrary to one-shot, ad hoc virtual teams, longer-lived virtual teams follow a sequential group development process. Virtual team development appears to differ from face-to-face teams because the use of computer-mediated communication heightens pressure to conform when a virtual team is first formed, meaning trust is most strongly linked with feeling that the team was accomplishing the task appropriately. As the virtual teams developed, trust in peers was more strongly linked with goal commitment. Once the teams were working together effectively, accomplishing the task appropriately was the strongest link with trust in peers. I suggest that virtual team managers should cultivate virtual workspaces that are similar to those proven to work in face-to-face contexts: (1) teams should have clear, specific goals, (2) members should be encouraged or even required to communicate with each other, and (3) team members should feel that they might work with the other team members again.     

Impact of heterogeneity and collaborative conflict management style on the performance of synchronous global virtual teams

Virtual teams cut across organizational cultures, national cultures, and functional areas, thereby increasing group heterogeneity, which may result in increased conflict among team members and less effective performance of the team. Our study explored the relationships that might exist among the heterogeneity of the virtual teams, their collaborative conflict management style, and their performance outcomes. The paper reports the findings of a laboratory experiment in which homogeneous and heterogeneous virtual teams, consisting of subjects from the USA and India, worked independently on a decision task involving the adoption of a computer use fee by an online university. Team members, used a web-based group decision support system (GDSS) that allowed them the opportunity to discuss task options, critique suggestions, and vote on the result. The data analyses suggested that collaborative conflict management style positively impacted satisfaction with the decision making process, perceived decision quality, and perceived participation of the virtual teams. There was weak evidence that links a group’s heterogeneity to its collaborative conflict management styles.     

Institutional boundaries and trust of virtual teams in collaborative design: An experimental study in a virtual world environment

Members of virtual teams often collaborate within and across institutional boundaries. This research investigates the effects of boundary spanning conditions on the development of team trust and team satisfaction. Two hundred and eighty-two participants carried out a collaborative design task over several weeks in a virtual world, Second Life. Multigroup structural equation modeling was used to examine our research model, which compares individual level measurement between two boundary spanning team conditions. The results indicate that trusting beliefs have a positive impact on team trust, which in turn, influences team satisfaction. Further, we found that, compared to cross-boundary teams, within-boundary teams exhibited not only higher trusting beliefs and higher satisfaction with the collaboration process but also a stronger relationship between team trust and team satisfaction. These results suggest that trust and group theories need to be interpreted in light of institutional affiliation and contextual variables. An important practical implication is that trust can be fostered in a virtual world environment and collaboration on complex tasks can be carried out effectively in virtual worlds. However, within-boundary virtual teams are preferred over cross-boundary virtual teams if satisfaction with the collaboration process is of the highest priority.     

Schmoozing and Smiting: Trust,Social Institutions,and Communication Patterns in an MMOG

This study examines how trust is related to online social institutions, self‐disclosure, mode of communication, and message privacy in a popular MMOG, Everquest II. The findings, based on survey and behavioral data from over 3,500 players, illustrate how MMOGs may support trust development. Trust was higher within closer social circles: trust was highest in teammates, followed by other players across the game, followed by others online. Self‐disclosure was positively related to trust of teammates and others in the game, while voice chat was only related to teammate trust. These findings indicate that social structures and communication processes contribute to trust development in MMOGs, supporting the claim that these online spaces provide social support that is unavailable in other societal realms.     

Measures and models of personality and their effects on communication and team performance

The importance of teams and their impact on the contemporary workplace cannot be overstated. Many studies have been conducted to point to specific relevant factors related to team performance. Nonetheless, there remains relatively little that is known about the mechanisms and interactions that lead to high performing teams. In this study we consider communication (a key feature of teamwork) as a potentially mediating factor between each aspect of human personality (as measured by the Five Factor Model) and team performance. This exploratory study sheds further light on how personalities affect teams via communication, using a structural equation modeling approach. Results indicate that at least one team measure of extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness is moderated by communication in influencing team performance.Relevance to industryThis research can aid managers on the relative importance of personality metrics on team performance, as well as the nature of the relationships among these metrics. This has the potential to improve organizational performance and reinforces the need for communication in fostering teamwork.     

The pursuit of trust in <Emphasis Type="Italic">ad hoc</Emphasis> virtual teams: how much electronic portrayal is too much?

This study develops and tests the concept of electronic portrayal in synchronous computer-mediated communication of ad hoc virtual teams. Electronic portrayal is the extent to which a communication system portrays the true identity of its users. A theoretical model is developed based upon which it is hypothesized that increased information available due to electronic portrayal will impact trust in ad hoc virtual teams. An experiment is conducted to test the model by manipulating the graphical identification of users of a system as well as the rehearsability of the system. Rehearsability is the extent to which users can reread and edit their messages before submitting them to the synchronous communication system. The results show that the combination of both factors – identification and rehearsability – impacts trust among team members. Specifically, partial electronic portrayal (only one form of true-to-life representation) has the most positive impact on trust. This effect is moderated by communication-related variables such as self-disclosure, impressions and virtual co-presence. The implication of these results is that too much true identity information negatively impacts trust. This research provides theoretical and practical contributions for understanding the importance of identification and rehearsability in synchronous group communication.     

The effect of process tailoring on software project performance: The role of team absorptive capacity and its knowledge‐based enablers

Software process tailoring (SPT) is a team‐based and learning‐intensive activity that addresses the particular dynamic characteristics of a development project. Because SPT critically influences how projects are conducted, its performance should be investigated. However, the extant literature lacks empirical evidence on how the underlying effects of SPT performance and its team‐supportive factors operate and influence software project performance. From the knowledge perspective, this study adopts dynamic capabilities theory and considers the learning ability and absorptive capacity of software project teams to develop a theoretical model to address this gap. The results of an empirical examination of the model with 135 software project teams advance our understanding of how team‐level learning antecedents—experience, communication quality and trust—dynamically facilitate teams' absorptive capacity (AC) when they conduct SPT, which in turn reinforces project performance. The mediating effects of the proposed model are unveiled and discussed, and theoretical implications as well as practical guidance for how AC and these factors promote SPT and project performance are suggested.     

Fostering trust in virtual project teams: Towards a design framework grounded in a TrustWorthiness ANtecedents (TWAN) schema

Several collaboration problems in virtual project teams that work in knowledge-intensive contexts can be attributed to a hampered process of interpersonal trust formation. Solutions to trust formation problems need to be based on an understanding of how interpersonal trust forms in face-to-face project teams as well as on insight into how this process differs in virtual teams. Synthesizing literature from various disciplines, we propose a model for the formation of interpersonal trust between project team members. Taking this model as a starting point, we analyse how virtual settings may alter or even obstruct the process of trust formation. One method to improve the formation of interpersonal trust in virtual settings is to facilitate the assessment of trustworthiness. This can be done by making information available about individual virtual project team members. Previous research in virtual project teams focussed principally on the medium by which information is spread, for example, by phone, mail, or videoconferencing. Most researchers failed to take the specific content of the information into account, although there is general agreement that personal, non-task-related information is important to foster trust. For this, we propose to use the antecedents of trustworthiness, which until now have mainly been used as a framework to measure trust, as a design framework instead. This framework of antecedents can also be used to determine which type of information is relevant to assess each other’s trustworthiness. We review existing literature on the antecedents of trustworthiness and extend the well-accepted antecedents of ‘ability’, ‘benevolence’ and ‘integrity’ with several other antecedents, such as ‘communality’ and ‘accountability’. Together, these form the TrustWorthiness ANtecedents (TWAN) schema. We describe how these antecedents can be used to determine which information is relevant for team members assessing others’ trustworthiness. In future research we will first verify this extended cognitive schema of trustworthiness (TWAN) empirically and then apply it to the design of artefacts or guidelines, such as a personal identity profile to support the assessment of trustworthiness in virtual project teams.     

The effect of risk on trust attitude and trust behavior in interaction with information and decision automation

Situational risk has been postulated to be one of the most important contextual factors affecting operator’s trust in automation. However, experimentally, it has received only little attention and was directly manipulated even less. To close this gap, this study used a virtual reality multi-task environment where the main task entailed making a diagnosis by assessing different parameters. Risk was manipulated via the altitude, the task was set in including the possibility of virtually falling in case of a mistake. Participants were aided either by information or decision automation. Results revealed that trust attitude toward the automation was not affected by risk. While trust attitude was initially lower for the decision automation, it was equally high in both groups at the end of the experiment after experiencing reliable support. Trust behavior was significantly higher and increased during the experiment for the decision automation supported group in the form of less automation verification behavior. However, this detrimental effect was distinctly attenuated under high risk. This implies that negative consequences of decision automation in the real world might have been overestimated by studies not incorporating risk.

     

Effects of time pressure and communication environment on team processes and outcomes in dyadic planning

An experiment compared dyadic performance in a radio communication and a more sophisticated communication environment to face-to-face (FtF) meetings. Thirty-six dyads, working under low or high time-pressure conditions, needed to combine information and to produce a written plan. Teams working in the sophisticated communication environment collaborated from separate locations over a networked computer system allowing them to share a note-taking program, work in parallel, and exchange in real-time audio as well as video. Results revealed detrimental effects of time pressure on both team processes and outcomes, and supported our hypothesis that distributed teams can perform as well as FtF teams. No differences were found between FtF teams and teams working in the sophisticated communication environment on process and outcome measures, except for the quantity of performance: The sophisticated communication environment enabled distributed teams to work on the task more rapidly than their FtF counterparts. Radio teams produced plans of lower quality and were less satisfied with the quality of their planning process than FtF teams.     

A Data‐Driven Approach for Real‐Time Clothes Simulation†

A data‐driven approach for the real‐time processing of clothes, particularly suitable for simulating dresses worn by virtual characters, is proposed. It starts, prior to real‐time simulation, by analyzing cloth behavior in relation to the underlying skeleton movement from a presimulated sequence of the cloth obtained using any high‐quality off‐line simulators. The idea is to use this analysis to find an optimal combination of physics‐based simulation and geometric approximation of the simulator; potentially colliding regions are defined on the cloth such that they will hold true for the skeleton movement that closely matches that of presimulated sequence. At runtime, using these analyses, our simulation process provides both visually pleasing results and performance, as long as the motion of the character remains sufficiently close to the original sequence used for the precomputation. The key contributions of this paper are (1) efficient collision handling that prunes out potentially colliding objects by using the off‐line simulation sequence as examples; (2) data‐driven fix‐up process for the coarse mesh simulation that deduces the gross behavior of the cloth; and (3) geometric approximation of the fine mesh deformation, responsible for details in the shape of the cloth such as wrinkles.     

Trust ontologies for e‐service environments

In this article, we introduce trust ontologies. An ontology represents a set of concepts that are commonly shared and agreed to by all parties in a particular domain. Here, we introduce generic and specific trust ontologies. These ontologies include the following: an agent trust ontology and trustworthiness; agents include sellers, service providers, Web sites, brokers, shops, suppliers, buyers, or reviewers. A services trust ontology and trustworthiness assists in measuring the quality of service that agents provide in the service‐oriented environment such as sales, orders, track and trace, warehousing, logistics, education, governance, advertising, entertainment, trading, online databases, virtual community services, security, information services, opinions, and e‐reviews. A goods or products trust ontology and trustworthiness is useful for measuring the quality of products such as commercial products, information products, entertainment products, or second‐hand products. We present a trust ontology that is suitable for all types of agents that exist in the service‐oriented environment. As agent trust is measured through the quality of goods and services, we introduce two additional distinct concepts of service trust ontology and product trust ontology. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 519–545, 2007.     

Effects of Perceived Interactivity,Perceived Web Assurance and Disposition to Trust on Initial Online Trust

We developed an interdisciplinary model to examine how online consumers' perceived interactivity, perceived Web assurance and disposition to trust affect their initial online trust. Perceived interactivity is theorized as an interpersonal‐based antecedent, disposition to trust as a personality‐based antecedent, and perceived Web assurance as an institution‐based antecedent to initial online trust. Results indicate that both consumers' perceived interactivity and perceived Web assurance positively influence their initial online trust. Therefore, it is of importance that e‐vendors make efforts to enhance online consumers' perceived interactivity of their Web sites as well as addressing consumers' major trust concerns by adopting third‐party Web assurance seals.     

Influences of haptic communication on a shared manual task

With the advent of new haptic feedback devices, researchers are giving serious consideration to the incorporation of haptic communication in collaborative virtual environments. For instance, haptic interactions based tools can be used for medical and related education whereby students can train in minimal invasive surgery using virtual reality before approaching human subjects. To design virtual environments that support haptic communication, a deeper understanding of humans′ haptic interactions is required. In this paper, human′s haptic collaboration is investigated. A collaborative virtual environment was designed to support performing a shared manual task. To evaluate this system, 60 medical students participated to an experimental study. Participants were asked to perform in dyads a needle insertion task after a training period. Results show that compared to conventional training methods, a visual-haptic training improves user′s collaborative performance. In addition, we found that haptic interaction influences the partners′ verbal communication when sharing haptic information. This indicates that the haptic communication training changes the nature of the users′ mental representations. Finally, we found that haptic interactions increased the sense of copresence in the virtual environment: haptic communication facilitates users′ collaboration in a shared manual task within a shared virtual environment. Design implications for including haptic communication in virtual environments are outlined.