TRUST CONGRUENCE IN TEAMS: THE JOINT IMPACT OF TEAM COMPOSITIONAL, STRUCTURAL, AND INTERACTIONAL FACTORS

Despite the pervasive practical need to understand how shared trust emerges in teams, little is known about this issue so far. This is because research has focused on the consequences of team trust rather than its antecedents,... [ view full abstract ]

Despite the pervasive practical need to understand how shared trust emerges in teams, little is known about this issue so far. This is because research has focused on the consequences of team trust rather than its antecedents, and has almost exclusively examined team trust as a consensus-based construct, thereby ignoring meaningful dispersion in members’ trust perceptions. We address this issue by advancing and testing a conceptual model of the antecedents of trust congruence in teams – a dispersion-based construct that captures the extent to which members’ perceptions of trust in their team are shared. Integrating insights from the literatures on team trust and dispersion-based emergent group constructs, we propose that compositional (i.e., cultural diversity), structural (i.e., shared leadership) and interactional factors (i.e., virtual communication) as conceptually and functionally distinct antecedents that jointly influence team trust congruence. Multi-wave survey data from 95 self-managing MBA teams confirmed most of our hypotheses, showing that shared leadership and virtual communication help to overcome the negative impact of cultural diversity on team trust congruence.