Building Virtual Teams

4   Discussion

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095781-4

4.1 Research summary

This book looks at building and maintaining trust as social practices. It focuses on the actions and interactions of team members and managers working in virtual teams in their real-life work context. Our research proposes a new conceptualization of trust as a social practice, for which the unit of analysis is the practice (see Section 2.3). Moving beyond shared beliefs of trustworthiness between team members and collective sets of expectations to trust practices, as actions and interactions between team members, allows exploration of a comprehensive, holistic view of trust.

We proposed a model to analyze trust as a practice focusing on the processes that occur at team level (e.g., ...