Modelling Trust into an Agent-Based Simulation Tool to Support the Formation and Configuration of Work Teams

One important factor that contributes to create good or bad relationships between individuals inside human societies is the notion of trust. In particular, some research works have proved the influence of trust in the performance of the activities that team-members perform jointly. This paper presents our initial theoretical work to include the trust factor into our TEAKS (TEAm Knowledge-based Structuring) model. TEAKS is an agent-based model to simulate the interaction between individuals when working together in the development of a project. Each team-member is represented through a set of pre-selected human characteristics: the emotional state, social characteristics. cognitive abilities, and personality types. The main outcome of the TEAKS simulation is statistical information about the possible performance at the individual and team levels. In this context we use two (emotional state and personality traits) of the four modelled human characteristics to introduce a model of trust into TEAKS to analyse the impact of trust in the results of the team.