Investigating Trust Factors in Global Virtual Collaboration: A Case Study of a Manufacturing Company in China

Abstract

With the increase development of information technologies, virtual teams have been playing a more and more significant role in organizational collaboration. Trust has become more and more vital in the context of mixed used in face-to-face and global virtual collaboration. There are different perspectives of trust factors in previous studies. This research attempt to analyze individual trust factors and explores new trust factors and their detailed sub-factors in business global virtual collaboration. We interviewed five people with important position in a manufacturing company in China. Through analyzing the interview data, we identified four main important factors: risk, benefit, power and effort, which have significant influence on collaboration. Furthermore, we also proposed sub-factors of each trust factors, which were associated with main factors. We also provide directions for future works.