Building Virtual Teams Trust, Culture, and Remote Working

Exploring the practices developed by remote teams to maintain trust across cultures, this book offers both theoretical and practical resources to enable better working in challenging contexts of project work. This book emphasizes building trust between team members from a practice perspective, meaning patterns of collective, shared activities that are produced and reproduced within the virtual team with the purpose of developing team trust. The author explores the trust practices that members of remote project teams use to describe their relationships and interactions. Team trust practices are powerful organizational tools for members of remote cross-cultural teams, influencing team decision-making and facilitating team effectiveness. This book offers extensive descriptions of team practices that build and maintain trust in virtual teams in two different cultures: Germany and Singapore. This is a unique contribution as it offers case studies from project teams that were observed and interviewed during their work and provides readers an in-depth, contextual analysis of the trust practices that virtual project teams develop, which previous research has overlooked. This book will appeal to researchers and graduate students in MBA programs studying project management, human resource management, and strategic leadership. This book is also of direct interest to many practitioners, particularly management consultants and project managers of virtual, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary project teams.

Introduction 1.1 Research context and objectives 1.2 Organization of the book 1.3 Characteristics and challenges of remote teams 1.4 Development of remote teams Building and maintaining trust in remote teams 2.1 Defining trust – interpersonal, team, and organizational trust 2.2 Integrative model of trust 2.3 Swift trust model 2.4 A novel approach: trust as a social practice 2.4.1 Practice theories in organizational research 2.4.2 A model of building and maintaining trust as a practice 2.5 Team case study: building and maintaining trust in a remote development team Trust and culture in remote project teams 3.1 Defining culture – national, organizational, and team culture 3.2 Cultural dimensions theory 3.3 Trust practices and culture 3.4 Comparative case studies: trust practices in Germany and Singapore Discussion 4.1 Research summary 4.2 Theoretical contribution 4.3 Practical implications 4.4 Conclusion

Catalina Dumitru is an Affiliated Researcher at the Bremen Graduate School for Social Sciences. She has completed her PhD in Business Administration at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany, and her work has been published in the European Journal of Business and Management Research and the International Journal of Management and Applied Research. Her research interests include trust, project teams, practice theories, and culture.