Virtual Teams Across National Borders

8 Trust Building and Informal Communication in International Virtual Teams

Irit Chudner and Tamar Almor

DOI: 10.4324/9781003398745-8

Introduction

Since the start of the third millennium, an ever-increasing number of internationalising companies have begun employing international virtual teams (IVTs) in response to the challenges of the dynamic business environments worldwide. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with high risks of infection, social restrictions and lockdowns, more than 80 per cent of the multinational companies shifted their work practices to (international) virtual teams (Meluso et al., 2020). In the post-pandemic situation, the shift to global and IVTs appears to be permanent even though countries have again opened their ...