Lesson 3: Building and Maintaining Trust

From Swift Trust to Personal Trust on a GV Team

While swift trust is important at the start of any team project, it can only sustain GV team interactions for a short time time (Lojeski & Reilly, 2008, Baskerville & Nandkumar, 2007, Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999). Swift trust must be nurtured and developed into personal trust to support longer periods of GV team activity. Unless nurtured and sustained, trust will dissipate over time. On GV teams trust is highly dependent on communication and team interactions. Team members need to commit to assignments and follow through with actions. If a team member does not keep his or her commitments or fulfill assignments, trust among team members diminishes. It can quickly change a trusting relationship to one of little or no trust.

Subgroups: On GV teams, members cannot meet as they do in the same location. Differences in culture, location or even task may cause local team members to form sub-groups. Subgroups support trust building when they allow team members to interact and communicate in a subunit of the larger team. The subgroup can work to support one another and help team members when needed. However when one sub-group has (or provides) inadequate information to other team members, fosters misconceptions or reduces interactions with other team members beyond the subgroup, trust will be damaged. Unless the misconceptions are clarified and corrected false perceptions form and trust decreases. The misconceptions and false perceptions may be the result of how cultures communicate (i.e. using indirect methods to say no or desiring to help a team member save face). It may be the result of different methods cultures use to solve the task. If the team is situated as part of a course in separate universities, there may be a mismatch in required assignments, due dates and presentations. Each of these differences provides a disconnect between the team members and prevents a longer lasting trust to form.

Clarification: To build and preserve trust, team members need to seek constant clarification. Team members need to ask specific questions and provide answers to team members from different cultures. This allows team members to be clearly understood. It is essential to ask questions and seek clarifications on all issues. This should not be done from an accusatory position. Rather it needs to come from the position of, "Do I really understand what you are asking or answering?" One needs to examine his or her actions in terms of how it is affecting others and what needs to be done to build understanding and trust.

Adopting this stance of seeking understanding and building trust is demonstrated in several ways. Team members may ask for advice and input on their part of the project. Offers of help, on a personal level, may help build trust. Looking for ways to collaborate and share helps to build trust. Team members may need to take care not to give or take offense in the way things are said and done. For example, if a culture is more direct in the way things are said and done, comments and actions may come across as being more harsh than intended. Seeking clarification and explaining how things may be done differently in one culture as opposed to another, will allow understanding and trust to be built.