Trust over Time and Distance in Global Partially Distributed Teams

Partially Distributed Teams (PDTs), increasingly common in this global economy, have some collocated members in subteams but the subteams are distributed over geographic distance. Trust is crucial for effective team functioning and may be even more so in PDTs which have unique characteristics that can impede the development and maintenance of trust. In a quasi-experimental field study we examine the dimensions of trust, how trust changes over time, and the effects of temporal and cultural distance on trust in PDTs composed of subteams from 8 nations. Results indicate that in PDTs, early trust predicts later trust, trust is multidimensional, and can increase over time. Variations in trust by temporal and cultural distance between the subteams in PDTs are more inconsistent than anticipated and the relationship with cultural distance decreases over time.