Week 5: Swift Trust

This week the conversation turns towards the challenges that teleworkers and dispersed team leaders and members routinely face. As you are forming your own project team, you are probably experiencing many of them. Be patient, for they are normal, and can be overcome.

Core issues surround structuring the team, selecting or developing team members with the appropriate "telework" qualities, building trust, establishing "person-to-person" communication and work relationships, and becoming comfortable with the sense or feeling of being isolated.

This week online handouts explores team structure and team member qualities, as well as the notion of social presence and isolation. In the blog we will examine building trust, particularly "swift trust" and "telepresence", the notion of being present without being tied to a physical location.

Traditionally, trust takes time to establish, and develops after many personal or professional encounters and work projects. But, what about teams that only come together for one project, or a new team that only has a short amount of time to accomplish a complex project?

Trust is "both the specific expectation that another's actions will be beneficial rather than detrimental... and the generalized ability to "take for granted, to take under trust, a vast array of features of the social order" (Creed and Miles, "Trust in Organizations" in Trust in Organizations edited by Kramer and Tyler, 1996, p. 17).

Regarding business enterprises, there are three levels of trust. As Kramer and Tyler (1996) explain in the Introduction to their book, understanding workplace trust involves comprehending the influence of social organizations on patterns of trust, understanding social networks, and being knowledgeable about the psychological basis for trust and mistrust.Trust needs interpersonal relationships, a frequency of "social" contact, and the emotional closeness. because of this organizational boundaries, workplace locales, and connections with work colleagues are significant.

"Temporary groups, at times, develop "swift trust:" ... [S]wift trust in temporary systems is...not so much an interpersonal form as a cognitive and action form. Trust work...[is]...tied to levels of interdependence....[S]wift trust is...when interdependence is kept modest through a combination of distancing, adaptability, resilience, interacting with roles rather than personalities, and viewing one's participation as partly voluntary (trust) and partly involuntary (confidence). In short, swift trust is less about relating than doing....Swift trust is not surrender. But neither is it calculated aloofness. Instead, it is artful making with a modest set of general cues from which inferences are drawn about how people might care for what we entrust to them. Those inferences are driven by generic features of the setting rather than by personalities or interpersonal relations. In this sense, swift trust is a pragmatic strategy for dealing with the uncertainties generated by a complex system concocted to perform a complex, interdependent task using the specialized skills of strangers" Meyerson, Weick, & Kramer, "Swift Trust and Temporary Groups" in Trust in Organizations by Kramer and Tyler, 1996, pp. 191-192).

So, what do you think are practical methods for developing trust among teleworkers and in a virtual team environment? How can managers effectively build trust in a dispersed workplace?

The next blog will be on telepresence and working in a dispersed workplace.

Chuck Piazza