Flows, bridges and brokers: exploring the development of trust relations in a distributed work group

During the last few decades several important empirical studies have documented that trust is important for the efficiency of distributed groups (Piccoli and Ives, 2003; Wilson et al., 2006). It has also been documented that more task-oriented forms of trust (i.e., swift trust) develop more easily in such teams than affective trust forms (Meyerson et al., 1996; Jarvenpaa and Leidner, 1999; Kanawattanachai and Yoo, 2002). More poorly understood are the underlying mechanisms that generate different types of trust within distributed groups in the first place. In this article, findings from a study of affective and cognitive trust relations in a group of distributed engineers are presented, and it is demonstrated how these trust forms followed slightly different patterns. The findings indicate that 'trust brokering' occurred along both dimensions and that these activities were crucial for the development of trust in the group.

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