A cross‐disciplinary literature review: Examining trust on virtual teams

Effective and efficient teams communicate, collaborate, and perform, even if these teams are not co‐located. Although much is known about enabling effectiveness on face‐to‐face teams, considerably less is known about similarly enabling effectiveness on virtual teams. Yet the use of virtual teams is common and will likely become more commonplace as organizations continue to update and use increasingly sophisticated technology. Cohort and individual trust between team members is a significant component on most effective teams, virtual or face‐to‐face. This paper examines research on virtual teams and trust across disciplines, including management, e‐learning, business communication, decision making, human resource management, psychology, and IT, to identify major characteristics that increase our knowledge of how to establish and maintain trust in the virtual environment and on virtual teams.     

虚拟环境中的课程教学团队运作——以综合英语课程为例

本文借鉴虚拟团队概念和投入-过程-产出(I-P-O)模型,分析了综合英语课程教学团队在虚拟环境中运作的三个环节,将保障该团队有效运行的关键要素(沟通与协作、动态工作关系的维系、信任关系的建立)在过程环节中单独列出并进行探讨,以解释教学团队设计、过程和绩效之间的关系。本文旨在引发对虚拟环境中的课程教学团队的多维度思考,以拓展远程开放教育师资队伍建设的发展空间,探索远程开放教育教学团队的运作规律及特性,提升远程开放教育的教学质量。     

Communication skills to develop trusting relationships on global virtual engineering capstone teams

As universities seek to provide cost-effective, cross-cultural experiences using global virtual (GV) teams, the ‘soft’ communication skills typical of all teams, increases in importance for GV teams. Students need to be taught how to navigate through cultural issues and virtual tool issues to build strong trusting relationships with distant team members. Weekly team meetings provide an excellent opportunity to observe key team interactions that facilitate relationship and trust-building among team members. This study observed the weekly team meetings of engineering students attending two US universities and one Asian university as they collaborated as a single GV capstone GV team. In addition local team members were interviewed individually and collectively throughout the project to determine strategies that facilitated team relations and trust. Findings indicate the importance of student choice of virtual communication tools, the refining of communication practices, and specific actions to build trusting relationships. As student developed these attributes, collaboration and success was experienced on this GV team.     

An examination of the relationship among structure,trust, and conflict management styles in virtual teams

The emergence of new technologies has made it increasingly easy for distributed collaboration in both educational and noneducational settings. Although the effectiveness in traditional settings of the dynamics of small group work has been widely researched, there is limited research that offers evidence on how teams can work effectively in a virtual environment. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship among team structure, trust, and conflict management style, in addition to their impact on teamwork effectiveness in a virtual environment. An experimental design was used to assess the effects of structure on team performance. Forty‐four groups, divided into hierarchical and nonhierarchical groups, worked on an online simulation project in an online MBA course. The results suggest that team structure is strongly associated with team performance, whereas trust and a collaboration conflict management style contribute to teamwork satisfaction.     

Impact of Virtual Work Environment on Traditional Team Domains

An extensive literature review and a phenomenological heuristic case study examined a virtual work team to determine what were salient domains of the team and determine the effect the virtual work environment had upon these domains. The study determined that post‐modern philosophy and postindustrial society are linked to changes in the marketplace and the development of virtual work environments. Seven team domains were identified. The virtual work environment affects the communication domain of teams most strongly. This effect impacts the remaining domains. Decision processes were determined to be narrower and featured conformity. Effectiveness was shown to be diminished by the reduction of social facilitation and increase in social loafing. Leadership was affected by the change in the communication network from an all‐channel network to a wheel network. Relationship and trust were affected by erosion of trust. Roles changed with the team's reduced ability to resolve differences and execute detailed action. Purpose became more task‐oriented. Technology emerged in the study as the new virtual team domain. Factors involved in team members' satisfaction were related to personality, isolation, and team membership.     

“Communicate Through the Roof”: A Case Study Analysis of the Communicative Rules and Resources of an Effective Global Virtual Team

Challenges to effective collaboration are magnified when work teams are composed of geographically distributed members. Team members separated by time, distance, and culture often struggle with issues of trust, conflict, and potentially divisive subgroups. With global virtual teams becoming increasingly common in organizations, it is important to understand how to minimize such interactional difficulties. This study examines rules and resources that members of a corporate global team draw on to structure their interactions. In this case study, team members draw on highly ritualized actions prescribed by their software development process and their enacted values to mitigate their communication challenges.     

Trust: the power that binds in team supervision of doctoral students

Team supervision of doctoral students adds new dimensions and complexities to relationships within the teams that impact functionality of the team. Trust emerged as a significant theme in recent qualitative research into the quality of team supervision of doctoral students. Trust was cited as a key component in successful team collaborations, and the missing component in dysfunctional teams. Definitions refer to trust as the belief of truthfulness, reliability or faith in another person’s abilities. My hypothesis is that trust operates as a form of power in team supervision. It is a form of power that enables voice, resilience and creativity in teams. This article concludes that placing trust in others in supervisory teams is a deliberate decision by candidates and supervisors. It is a decision to engage in a team context despite known risks and may be understood as a gamble on the reliability of others in the expectation of reciprocity. By conceptualising trust as a form of power, strategies that engender and maintain trust may be utilised more intentionally.     

虚拟学习社区信任机制的研究

虚拟学习社区是e-learning一种重要的应用模式,虚拟学习社区强调学生的主体性和学习活动的自主性,更加强调学习的合作性,社区成员之间共享学习资源,交流学习经验,共同完成学习任务。但是由于虚拟学习社区的虚拟性和社会性,使得成员之间信息共享和交流协作成为一个复杂的问题,而其中一个重要的方面就是社区成员是否信任其他成员提供的知识或者相信其他成员会贡献他们所拥有的知识。本文从虚拟学习社区存在的信任问题出发,通过研究和系统分析,讨论了虚拟学习社区的信任机制的建立。     

Learn to use and use to learn: Technology in virtual collaboration experience

This study examined how global learning teams utilized technology in a virtual collaboration to solve complex problems. The study offers an in-depth explanation of why and how the learning teams used technology to support computer-mediated communication. A model of technology application at different stages of virtual collaborative process is proposed. The model can be used to maximize potential of global teams and facilitate further integration of virtual collaboration into university curricula. Time difference and lack of nonverbal cues were identified as challenges the global teams faced. The benefits of virtual collaboration were the opportunities to: learn how to use technology in a meaningful way; practice using technology to solve problems; and broaden one's perspective by communicating with people from different cultures.     

运用虚拟学习团队拓展课堂教学的探索

文章在探讨虚拟学习团队概念的基础上,指出软件项目开发的相关课程的课堂外建立虚拟学习团队拓展课堂教学的可行性和必要性,并在此基础上提出了构建虚拟学习团队的一般策略。     

大学生虚拟交往对现实交往中的人际信任、情感平衡的影响研究

随着网络的普及,虚拟交往已成为大学生上网的最主要内容,但其对象的虚拟性和复杂性给大学生的人际交往带来一系列的挑战。通过探讨大学生虚拟交往对现实交往中的人际信任、情感平衡的影响,以期能全面分析大学生的人际交往状况,改善大学生的人际关系。调查研究发现:(1)在人际信任度上,女生在现实交往和虚拟交往两个维度上的得分均普遍高于男生;(2)不同年级大学生在虚拟交往和现实交往两个维度上存在显著差异。随着年级的升高,大学生的人际信任度逐渐升高;(3)大一学生情感平衡得分最高,随年级的升高呈递减的趋势;(4)大学生网络人际信任与现实人际信任存在显著的正相关。回归分析表明,网络人际信任对现实人际信任具有显著的预测作用。     

Global virtual teams in education: Do peer assessments motivate student effort?

During the last decade, global virtual teams have become increasingly common in academic and work settings. Considering the recent global pandemic, now they seem to be more the rule than an exception. Drawing on expectancy theory and using a latent growth model approach, this paper investigates the relationship between peer assessments and student individual effort to complete a given task. The analysis of these two variables as parallel processes indicates that the more abrupt the decrease in peer assessments, the steeper the positive rate of change in effort in the context of global virtual teams. This longitudinal study suggests that peer assessments are a useful and effective means to boost global virtual team members’ individual effort. The paper concludes with implications and recommendations for researchers, managers and educators who use global virtual teams in education and practice.     

认知模型研究的新成果及应用

综述认知模型研究近年来取得的成果及应用。研究了粒计算认知模型、动态信任预测认知模型、Bayes信任预测认知模型采用的主要算法,介绍了认知模型在求解认知难题、虚拟人决策训练、多Agent谈判中的应用。指出粒计算认知模型、动态信任预测认知模型、Bayes信任预测认知模型是近年来认知模型的主要研究成果。因此,认知模型的研究具有很高的应用价值。     

开放教育环境下虚拟团队的构建

虚拟团队是管理领域的新概念。它的特点与开放教育有许多相似之处，在开放教育中引入虚拟团队的概念是适宜和必要的。开放教育中应该构建教师、学生以及教与学三走虚拟团队。为了维护虚拟团队的正常运行，应该注意包括有效的沟通和监控在内的四个问题。     

Fostering online social construction of science knowledge with primary pre-service teachers working in virtual teams

As many primary pre-service teachers enter teacher education courses with little science background, it is essential in teacher education courses to provide opportunities for them to learn more science independently. The purpose of this study is to investigate an online pedagogical activity that fosters the social construction of science knowledge by primary pre-service teachers working in small virtual teams. The study investigated how the pre-service teachers collaborated online in virtual teams to complete set tasks, their attitudes toward and beliefs about the effectiveness of the online learning experience, and the types and quality of the resources developed. The findings indicated that the virtual team-produced science resource materials were generally of high quality, with nearly half the number of teams engaging with Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. wikis and blogs) to construct their product. The findings indicated positive attitudes toward the collaborative learning even though beliefs about online learning were mixed.     

Models and methodology for simulating virtual enterprises in educational environment

This paper deals with a semester-long educational experience the authors led at the University of Calabria for reproducing current developments and uncertainties in real-world concurrent engineering, knowledge management practice and virtual enterprise organization. Students with different backgrounds (mechanical engineering, computer science engineering and management engineering) were selected in order to form a laboratory class and then were divided into many multidisciplinary teams. Such teams played different roles and were required to collaborate on the Web to simulate a virtual enterprise, which was aimed at designing virtual prototypes of average complexity articles. In addition to that, any team was involved in the construction of a knowledge base for codifying the explicit knowledge arising from the execution of technical and managerial tasks. The paper deals with models, methodologies and technologies that have been used in this laboratory experience and, moreover, it describes an approach for simulating, in an educational environment, some aspects of the behaviour of virtual enterprises generated by a virtual organization.     

Phases and patterns of group development in virtual learning teams

With the advancement of Internet communication technologies, distributed work groups have great potential for remote collaboration and use of collective knowledge. Adopting the Complex Adaptive System (CAS) perspective (McGrath, Arrow, & Berdhal, Personal Soc Psychol Rev 4 (2000) 95), which views virtual learning teams as an adaptive and self-organizing entity, this study examined group development processes of seven intact virtual learning teams over 12 weeks using the multiple case study design. Content analysis revealed seven temporal group development phases: orientation, scheduling, exploration, work and decision, progress check and evaluation, refinement and formatting, and termination. The development pattern of each virtual learning team could be described as either Linear Progression, a straight movement through those phases, or Adaptive Progression, a backward movement to a previous phase for adaptation before proceeding. We also identify the factors that caused each team to develop in one way or the other and conclude with the implications of conceptualizing virtual teams as a CAS.     

Global engineering teams – a programme promoting teamwork in engineering design and manufacturing

Engineering graduates are expected to possess various competencies categorised into hard and soft skills. The hard skills are acquired through specific coursework, but the soft skills are often treated perfunctorily. Global Engineering Teams (GET) is a programme that promotes project-oriented tasks in virtual student teams working in collaboration with industry partners. Teamwork is a major success factor for GET as students always work in groups of varying sizes. A questionnaire-based survey of the 2008 cohort of GET students was conducted to assess teamwork, communication and conflict resolution among group members. The results confirmed that deliverables are readily achieved in teams and communication was open. A challenge of using virtual teams is the availability of high-speed Internet access. The GET programme shows that it is possible to deliver engineering design and manufacturing via industry/university collaboration. The programme also facilitates multidisciplinary teamwork at an international level.     

Cross‐Cultural Management Learning Through Innovative Pedagogy: An Exploratory Study of Globally Distributed Student Teams

This article presents an innovative pedagogy based on student participation in globally distributed project teams. The study questions the link between student learning of intercultural competence and the global teaming experience. Data was collected from 115 students participating in 22 virtual intercultural teams. Results revealed that students learned from the teaming experience, especially those with more prior international experience. The study contributes to the body of knowledge on innovative and collaborative pedagogy on global student teams, provides an analysis of the impact of the teaming experience on student learning, and provides insights on international and collaborative course design.     

Distance Artist: Building the Skills of Future Creatives. Developing Evidence‐Based Criteria for Global Virtual Team Tutoring and Management in Art and Design Education

This article reflects on six years of research activities in the field of long‐distance collaboration and more specifically on how creative virtual teams operate and respond to challenges set by emerging and developing technologies. Furthermore, it considers how to build, manage and shape a more inclusive virtual team, documenting the methodologies applied in each activity, the experiences of both tutors and students and the educational context in which the international study took place. The project set out with a methodology for observing, managing and developing the interaction dynamics between each creative team member involved in the design of activities and practice of delocalized teams. The project is positioned within the field of educational technology and identifies a set of operative recommendations aimed at educators so that remote creative collaborative work can result most effective. The article explores the potential of virtual teams supporting communication and design.