Christina Breuer’s research while affiliated with University of Münster and other places

Do we really need personal meetings to develop trust within teams? Which factors impact trust emergence within face-to-face and virtual teams? How do high-trust teams interact compared with teams with low team trust? Trust is seen as an important predictor of behavior in teams. However, the psychological mechanisms linking team trust to both its antecedents and its behavioral consequences are not well understood. The present study introduces a new taxonomy of team trust mechanisms by integrating results from a qualitative interview study with prior theoretical and empirical research on team trust. We conducted exploratory interviews based on the critical incident technique with 55 professionals who had substantial teamwork experience. Altogether, 776 behavioral items were collected stemming from 127 team events that were perceived as critical

As argued throughout this volume, trust matters. This importance has spawned a number of major contemporary efforts to increase trust in numerous domains. These efforts typically seek to leverage the best available science for understanding and motivating trust but it is, as yet, not well understood to what degree trust is essentially the same or importantly different across the various domains. Trust building efforts are, therefore, often left with little guidance as the critical issues to address when applying work from other domains. This chapter takes up this deficiency by reviewing the major mainstream conceptualizations, antecedents, and outcomes of trust in four domains: public administration, policing, state courts, and medicine. The chapter concludes that trust is in fact, notably similar across domains but that there are critical differences to be attended to. Specifically, we argue that trust across contexts can be thought of as a willingness to accept vulnerability in dealings with an other but the most important drivers of that willingness are likely to vary somewhat as a function of the domain.

Team trust has often been discussed both as requirement and as challenge for team effectiveness, particularly in virtual teams. However, primary studies on the relationship between trust and team effectiveness have provided mixed findings. The current review summarizes existing studies on team trust and team effectiveness based on meta-analytic methodology. In general, we assumed team trust to facilitate coordination and cooperation in teams, and therefore to be positively related with team effectiveness. Moreover, team virtuality and documentation of interactions were considered as moderators of this relationship because they should affect perceived risks during teamwork. While team virtuality should increase, documentation of interaction should decrease the relationship between team trust and team effectiveness. Findings from 52 studies with 54 independent samples (representing 12,615 individuals in 1,850 teams) confirmed our assumptions. In addition to the positive overall relationship between team trust and team effectiveness criteria (ρ = .33), the relationship between team trust and team performance was stronger in virtual teams (ρ = .33) as compared to face-to-face teams (ρ = .22), and weaker when team interactions were documented (ρ = .20) as compared to no such documentation (ρ = .29). Thus, documenting team interactions seems to be a viable complement to trust-building activities, particularly in virtual teams. (PsycINFO Database Record

The theoretical foundations of this chapter are based on the work of Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) and Schoorman, Mayer, and Davis (2007) (see Fig. 2.1). First, we briefl y review the competing defi nitions of trust that have been widely adopted in the past 20 years. Next, we examine the implications of the choice of defi nition, and fi nally we will review some of the constructs used to represent trust across a number of disciplines. In doing so we view these constructs from the lens of the Mayer et al. (1995) defi nition.