Examining the Formation of Swift Trust within a Scientific Global Virtual Team

Abstract

This study examines the development of trust within a 77 member global virtual team, "SciTeam", tasked with organizing a scientific conference. A dedicated discussion board space was created within a virtual scientific organization platform (on which team members from around the world interacted). The task included logistics, scheduling, and content components. We studied the team using a 'swift trust' framework, ideal for task-oriented geographically displaced communities in which strangers work together to complete an assigned task. A mixed methods approach allowed us to develop qualitatively-derived hypotheses which we quantitatively tested. A unique finding was that while we could discern team member's particular posting habits (social or task-oriented), a user's impact upon the forum along the axes of trust and sociability was more strongly determined by their overall activity than by a user's propensity to engage in trust or social behavior.