Global Virtual Teams. How the Usage of New Information and Communication Technologies can Enhance Trust in Global Virtual Teams

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Leadership and Human Resources - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, Fresenius University of Applied Sciences Hamburg, language: English, abstract: Globalization, flexibilization, decentralization and networking are all buzzwords that change our workplaces into work 4.0. Deloitte's recent Global Human Capital Trends Surveys from 2016 and 2018 describe the trends of self-organized networks and hyper-connected workplaces, as well as digital HR and recommends that organizations have to redesign their work environment with HR as creator to facilitate collaboration across company boundaries. Global virtual teams (hereafter: GVTs) are one way, to respond to those trends and stay competitive. Several surveys indicate, how ubiquitous global virtual teamwork is. A survey from 2016 included 1,372 respondents from 80 countries. 85% of those indicated that they already worked in GVTs. To be successful, these teams depend on diverse factors, as can be seen in figure 1 (not included in this text). One of the main difference between GVTs and co-located teams is the interaction through information and communication technologies (hereafter: ICTs). The most important success factor, yet bigg est challenge for those teams is to develop mutual trust. This paper will connect both success factors to find out, how trust can be built through the appropriate usage of cutting-edge ICTs. How to build trust is one of the most researched topics in the GVT literature. In addition, scholars already included trust-formation through communication in their research. However, they have not broadened their research to emerging ICTs, like Web 2.0 or virtual rooms yet. Scholars annotate critically that even though those technologies are already used in practice, 'research appears not to be keeping up with practice.' Regarding 3D virtual environments like virtual rooms, only five articles were found by Gilson et al. and the content was rather generic. Additionally, social networks, which are broadly used in practice, have yet not been focused within the scientific literature. The scholars recommend to addressing these topics in future research. Therefore, this paper starts to fill this scientific gap by developing assumptions regarding the formation of trust through new ICTs within GVTs, based on theoretical background. The results can be used for further research that verifies these assumptions practically through experiments.