The Effect of Trust and Knowledge Sharing on Team Effectiveness on a Virtual Team: A Case Study in Advanter (M) Sdn Bhd - From the Individual Perspective

The objective of this study was twofold. First, the study was to examine the relationship between trust and team effectiveness in the virtual team environment. Second, it was to determine whether knowledge sharing plays a mediating role in this relationship. A total of 318 questionnaires were distributed to virtual team employees in Advanter(M) Sdn Bhd. However, only 167 questionnaires were returned and 106 were usable for analysis. Correlation analysis was used to test the inter-correlation between the variables. Correlation result shows that the three dimensions of trust, i.e personality based trust; cognitive base trust and institutional base trust, are correlated with team effectiveness. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed to tests the hypotheses of the study. The results indicated that team effectiveness is positively associated with trust and knowledge sharing and knowledge sharing was found to be a mediator in the relationship between trust and virtual team effectiveness

Trust and its relationships with knowledge sharing and virtual team effectiveness

Virtual teams represent one form of organization structure that revolutionize the workplace and provide organizations with unprecedented levels of flexibility and responsiveness.However, implementing virtual teams could be quite challenging especially if it involves different languages, time zones, and communication styles.Most importantly, the autonomy of the virtual environment may cause team members to distort social and contextual information,and with limited proximal communication between team members,it can create a lack of trust among members of the virtual team members which can significantly reduce the effectiveness of these teams.Hence, this paper reports a study conducted to examine the relationship between trust and virtual teams effectiveness, by looking into the mediating effect of knowledge sharing.Results of hierarchical regression analysis indicated that knowledge sharing and all the three types of trust are significantly related to virtual team effectiveness.However, only personality- based trust and institutional-based trust are significantly related to knowledge sharing, but knowledge sharing only partially mediates the relationship between these two types of trust and team effectiveness