Can virtuality be protective of team trust? Conflict and effectiveness in hybrid teams

Abstract

Virtuality is noticeably present in organizations and influences the way people interact within teams. This study involved 104 organizational teams with some degree of virtuality and intends to analyze a moderated-mediation model in which virtuality moderates the indirect effect of team conflict on team effectiveness and innovation through team trust. First, results reveal that the negative association between conflict and team trust was significant for task conflict only in teams with low virtuality, and for relationship conflict was significant under low and moderate levels of virtuality. Finally, findings indicate that virtuality moderated the negative mediated relationship between both task and relationship team conflict and team effectiveness only through cognitive trust. Overall, the findings suggest that virtuality may protect team trust from the negative effects of conflict, and they point to the key role of cognitive trust as an antecedent of team effectiveness in hybrid teams.

Invoking team trust to facilitate performance management in the context of virtual teams

“…The Virtual Team Performance Management Framework is premised on the understanding that team trust is isomorphic to interpersonal trust (Alves et al, 2022). We therefore embrace the core antecedents of interpersonal trust.…”

“…Given the difficulty associated with building trust in nonvirtual contexts (Mayer & Davis, 1999), it is prudent to shine a light on within-team and across-team trust. This contributes to trust scholarship by advancing the nascent concept of team trust (Alves et al, 2022;Breuer et al, 2020) within the established team dynamics literature (Larson et al, 2020), especially in virtual contexts. As such, an exploratory study to examine how managers optimise the performance of virtual teams, with specific reference to the role of trust both within and across teams, is warranted and requires further investigation.…”

“…Crucially, team-based trust could be viewed as nested within the concept of organisational trust which relies less on interpersonal interactions and more on processes, systems and reputations embedded in the organisation. To this end, team-based trust is said to be isomorphic to interpersonal trust (Alves et al, 2022), such that it is (Breuer et al, 2016):…”

“…Mindful of virtual work contexts and building on the isomorphic nature of team trust in relation to interpersonal trust (Alves et al, 2022), we argue that PM can be reframed to privilege traditional trust antecedents such as competence, benevolence, reliability and integrity within the realm of team trust, alongside emerging antecedents such as predictability, transparency, feedback and shared values (Breuer et al, 2020;Ahteela & Vanhala, 2018). We further argue that the antecedent elements of benevolence, integrity, predictability and transparency are more operational when the focus shifts from interpersonal trust to team-based trust in virtual work contexts (Breuer et al, 2020) because they help to mitigate the inability to directly observe employees performing tasks, as would be the case in face-to-face work teams.…”

School Teachers’ Views Towards the Effects of a Crisis on Conflicts: The Case of the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…From the above, it could be maintained that the period of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have reshaped the relationships of cooperation and, by extension, the number, intensity and impact of the inevitable conflicts in social organizations such as schools (see Alves et al, 2022;Klonek et al, 2021). For this reason, the investigation of conflicts and their management in primary school units during the COVID-19 pandemic emerges as extremely important, given that the educational process must be conducted within a positive working environment (Charner-Laird et al, 2017;Evans & Yuan, 2018;OECD, 2009), whether in the physical space of schools or in an e-learning collaborative environment, the presence of which is expected to grow (Baldwin-Clark, 2021;Lee, 2021).…”