Individual Trust Development within Virtual Team Collaboration: A Scenario Simulation Study

In this paper, scenario simulation is used to investigate individual trust development in virtual team collaboration. Building trust is vital to virtual team collaboration and decision making. Risk, benefit, utility value, power, effort and interest are six factors that influence individual trust development. This paper introduces two new methods, Scale Balance Model and Trust Spider Diagram, to help investigate individual trust development. A survey was used to investigate individual trust development. There is also a three stage investigation sample using student teams. The results show that in the initial stage of the development of virtual teams, benefit and interests are the main factors affecting the individual trust, with the progress of team tasks, utility becomes one of the major factors; in the early stage, members may occur fairly strong interpersonal and task conflict which may have negative impact on interest and efforts; compared to the negative team, positive team is more focused on the task and members are more willing to participate in teamwork and enhance their power.