Control and Trust as Facilitators of Performance and Satisfaction in Managing Virtual Team Members

Abstract

In this article, we examined how control and trust used by virtual team managers to steer the members of virtual teams affect the individual performance and job satisfaction of the virtual team members. We distinguished between formal control and informal control as well as between cognition-based trust and affect-based trust. Answering this research question is important because research has not yet explained how managers of virtual teams can use formal and informal control as well as cognition- and affect-based trust to steer virtual teams. We collected survey data from 308 members of virtual teams in for-profit companies, which had not been done with this set of variables before. We used PLS-SEM to test our hypotheses. We found slight support for a positive effect of formal control on performance. Additionally, cognition-based trust was positively associated with performance while affect-based trust was positively associated with satisfaction. Our findings contribute to the research on virtual teams by providing a more differentiated view on control and trust in this setting. Furthermore, this study contributes to our understanding of the control-trust relationship on the interpersonal level and supports the notion that control can be beneficial for developing trust which was suggested in previous research.