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
