In: Operations Management
Please summarize the following in at least 250 words
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.
In today’s Scenario where all the companies have a global spread and willingness to have projects from anywhere from the globe it is obvious that the all the resources of the projects will not be collocated. But it is very important to build trust among all the stakeholders in the project otherwise the project can’t get success easily and the can’t follow the delivery timeline.
These project members or stakeholders are not from the same country, they don’t possess the same mindset and they are holding different hierarchical position so it will be an obvious thing that there will be no built up trust between them. So, the first process is to build trust among them that they can work together. In order to do so, there are many trainings available which helps people to understand others who are not collocated and from their voices and wording in the email.
People need to first access themselves and then others by which they can understand where they stand and How they can become trustworthy to others. There are different models in this methodology like, there are mainly 4 types of people who are
So first People has to understand what is their own life style and then they need to understand what is the other person’s life style. Then they need to be versatile and pull themselves from the shell and move to the other lifestyle for certain time during discussion that they can become more trustworthy to the other person. In this way people will open up, share and the project will become more successful.
Trustworthiness Antecedents schema (TWAN) is another tool which describe how these antecedents can be used to determine which information is relevant for team members assessing others' trustworthiness.
In this tool the perceived trustworthiness is derived from 5 factors and they are
There are many tool which are available for mind mapping and understand the social style of the people which helps people to gain trust of the others and with that the collaboration in the project will improve and bring success to the project.