The Importance Of Building Trust

Building trust

Trust is a key element of working together on a global scale. Trust is normally easier developed when meeting face-to-face and spending time together with team members. In traditional teams members can talk about personal matter, interact socially and meet outside of work to establish trust. However, virtual teams members lack face-to-face interactions and members cannot depend on smiles, raised eybrows or voice lev-els to see whether they are being understood (Roebuck, et al., 2004). Virtual team members typically do not have a common past or future as a bases of building trust (Lin, et al., 2008) and because nonverbal cues do not exist asking for or sharing information with team members can be seen as risky due to the inability

People from different cultures and background can always contribute uniquely to a project. Nevertheless, ideas about what are good performance and communication styles can differ. Further differences can either be functional which can lead to team members with different knowledge bases, motivations, like-minded thinking approaches and reasoning abilities (Dubé & Paré, 2001) or organizational which show themselves as “learned behaviors within company cultures” (Dubé & Paré, 2001). Another form of difference is national which is based on cultural influences of the people’s nationalities. Regarding a member’s cultural background it can further be distinguished between more collective or more individualistic people. People from individualistic cultures put more emphasis on the needs, goals and values of the individual instead of those of the groups. Contrary to that, needs, values and goals of the group are in the center of people from collectivistic cultures (Yuhyung,

Team managers must hold a team together when different levels of trust, experiences, expectations, personalities and cultures clash (Joinson, 2002). Management styles that worked successfully with traditional teams is often not effective in leading virtual teams (Ferreira, et al., 2012). Hence, managers being used to keeping tabs on employee’s progress can feel uncomfortable in the beginning and need to change their management style. According to Anderson, a balance between a transactional and transformational approach has to be found (Anderson, 2012). This means that on the one hand administrative matter are addressed and tasks are optimized to maximize efficiency, on the other hand the ideas of team members and suggestions need to be