When affective commitment leads to viability: The role of trust as a mediator and virtuality as a moderator

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between affective commitment and team viability, considering team cognitive and affective trust as mediators and the team's level of virtuality as a moderator. A survey-based study was conducted with 177 Portuguese work teams from several companies, and hypotheses were tested through partial least structure equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Our results reveal no statistical evidence of a direct positive association between affective commitment and viability but a significant indirect relationship through cognitive trust. This result highlights the critical role of cognitive trust in promoting viability. Moreover, our findings reveal that virtuality negatively moderates the relationship between affective trust and viability. Although affective trust is positive for viability when virtuality is low, it becomes detrimental when teams present high levels of virtuality. For practice, our results suggest the importance of promoting cognitive trust among teams and the need to be mindful regarding the level of virtuality because it may impact how trust influences team outcomes.