Interplay between virtual teamworking and trust relationships

Dr Joe NandhakumarumarDepartment of Management University of Southampton

email: joe@soton.ac.ukInternet: www.soton.ac.uk/~joe

© Joe Nandhakumar, SEISN Meeting, London, 2000

Virtually collocated teams

• teamworking is key feature of modern organizations (eg. Hammer, 1997)

• teams become ‘virtually collocated teams’ as team members dispersed around the world – communicate mainly via Internet media (eg video-

conferencing, emails, instant messaging and interactive document sharing)

– have few opportunities to physically come together to share experiences or reciprocal disclosure (which have traditionally been seen as sources of trust relationships between organizational members).

Research questions

• How do personal trust relationships [or their absence] influence the effectiveness of virtual teamworking?

• How do electronic relationships established in virtual teamworking help to produce and reproduce trust relations?

Research Site

• a large multinational company with operations in over 70 countries

• virtual teamwork project was initiated to foster collaboration both within & among its business units & between their contractors & partners in joint ventures

• VT facilities consisted of a high power desktop PC which included desktop video conferencing + scanning facilities + multimedia email + groupware + internet/intranet + file transfer applications

Research approach

• Interpretivism: knowledge is socially constructed

• Intensive engagement with organizational members

• Data collection– observations & unstructured interviews with virtual

teamworkers– focused on participants of two virtual teams:

members of the knowledge management group (early adopters); and managers from a large construction project (Champions)

Results: New forms of relationships

Forms of relationshipsenacted with ‘virtualteamworking’

Examples

Online sharing relationships - document sharing- instantaneous communication/ sharing ideas- routine team meetings

Extending authorityrelationships

- making senior managers’presence more visible- obtaining sanctions for activities

Task-based temporaryrelationships

- to resolve a problem requiringexpert

knowledge

- temporary projects

Formation of trust relations

• temporary teams depend on trust based on abstract structures (eg body of reflexive knowledge)

• but they actively sought to establish personalized trust relationships for continuous teamworking:

“…to start establishing a [trust] relationship I think you do need to have the physical contact more because you have this indefinable thing about relationships and body language and you don’t get it in the same way….. so .. as you do the team

building you need to have some physical contact”

Reproduction of trust relationships

• In the absence of collocation, team members unable to maintain interpersonal relationships

• interactions enabled by VTPC were seen as inadequate for providing access to the ‘backstage’ activities (eg through socialization processes )

“we are having a global team meeting in two weeks time ….. the big joke is – ‘can’t you do this virtually?’- I say no we can’t do it virtually, we can get so far virtually but until we have a real good drink and a good meal and a good social chat at length we are not going to be a ‘real team’. …. We can then use technology to maintain it [relationship] and obviously its going to slide.”

ImplicationsTheory• different conceptualization of the interplay between

‘virtual teamworking’ and trust relationships– trust is a property of both individual organizational members and

abstract structures or systems of organizations– trust on abstract systems enables temporary alliances with

anonymous specialists to deal with problems and to share documents & expertise online

– for continuous teamworking, trust relationships should be actively regrounded in personal relationships with others, rather than relying exclusively on abstract conditions.

• Multimedia communication technologies is unable to contribute to reproduction and reinforcement of interpersonal trust relationships

Forms of trust relations

Influences of trust relations Forms oftrustrelations

Online sharingrelationship

Extendingauthorityrelationship

Temporaryrelationship

Based onabstractsystems

Confidence insystems ofexpertise andcommitments

Confidencein thelegitimacy ofpowerrelations

Confidencein theworking ofthe expertknowledge

Based onperson

psychologicallyrewarding,alleviate fear ofisolation andanxiety of usingVTPC

draw onresources ofauthority

positiveexpectations

ImplicationsPractice• need for organizational policies to create conditions for

socialization and construct opportunities for active interactions

E.g.: 1) provide resources in terms of expertise, time and skills to

become effective contributors

2) provide opportunities in terms of autonomy and authority

3) provide motivation to take the practice of good organizational citizenship seriously in terms of performing duties, which they owe to the other colleagues

“We try to have what we call virtual coffee sessions, which were dreadful …. all around the world we tried to get together and have a cup of coffee and sit down and look at each other, and you can't be spontaneous now, you can't do it, you can't force it.”