Interpersonal trust refers to the willingness to make oneself vulnerable to the actions of another party. Trust is generally acknowledged as fostering knowledge exchange and thus contributing to new product development (NPD) team effectiveness. However, the conditions under which NPD teams come to rely more heavily on trust to facilitate effectiveness remain unclear. With burgeoning global collaboration on new product development, we analyze how the characteristics of global NPD teams, i.e., geographic dispersion, computermediated communication (e.g., e-mail, video-conferencing), team membership flexibility, and national diversity moderate the trust-effectiveness relationship. Our results show that trust is more important under the condition of geographic dispersion, computer-mediated communication, and national diversity. By specifying when trust influences NPD team effectiveness in globally dispersed teams, we discuss the theoretical implications and provide recommendations for management. R&D Management 42, 1, 2012.

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that objective distance between team members (e.g., measured in miles) translates directly and fully into subjective distance (i.e., a team's perception of distance between its members). Drawing on social information processing theory, we argue that the level of subjective distance is likely to predict important team outcomes better than the level of objective distance. Using responses from 678 team leaders and team members pertaining to 161 new product development projects in the software industry, our results show that the subjective perception of distance is affected rather by team members' national diversity than their physical distance. We also find that subjective distance has a significant impact on team collaboration, while objective distance measures, however, have no impact on team collaboration. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

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EXTENDED ABSTRACT 1This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that team members' objective distance (e.g., measured in miles) translates directly and fully into subjective distance (i.e., a team's perception of distance between its members). We have build on social information processing theory and argue that team members' reactions to workplace stimuli such as 'dispersion' are more influenced by their perceptions of these stimuli than merely by their physical properties. Using responses from 678 team leaders and team members pertaining to 161 new product development projects in the software industry, our results show that the subjective perception of distance is affected rather by team members' national diversity than their physical distance. In alignment with this theory's presumptions, we find that team members' perceptions of distance do not primarily stem from the extent of their objective distance. Instead, subjective distance emanates from a more complex and socially based construction of reality which we find to be significantly affected by team members' national heterogeneity. In further support of social information processing theory, our analyses reveal that subjective distance as a psychological state is more predictive of social and task-related team processes than spatio-temporal distance or any form of configurational distance.In the theoretical part of this paper, we argue that spatiotemporal distance, configurational distance, and national diversity maintain their unique influence on the perception of distance. Interestingly, in our study, national diversity plays the pivotal role in explaining team members' perception of distance. It seems that teams in which the majority of members share the same nationality -on average -feel closer to one another, irrespective of their actual level of geographic, temporal or configurational dispersion.We conclude from these research results that objective distance as such is a meaningless variable of social science research. It does not tell anything about the dynamics in the team. Objective distance measures only provide descriptive information about the configuration of team members across different locations, countries, continents or time zones. This research, however, suggests that it is rather the perception of distance that represents the more critical, though missing link to understand distance and dispersed team dynamics. As shown in our research, the state of being physically distant can obviously co-exist with feeling close. In this regard, 1 The full paper is available from the authors upon request. perceived distance brings a new quality into researchers' conceptualization of distance.But the perception of distance may not only be included into group research to better predict virtual team functioning and to demonstrate that distance matters but also to explain why distance matters. Theory building as well as empirical modeling of geographically distributed teams' processes and outcomes will be enhanced by providing scholars with the subjective...

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