ABSTRACT
Team decision making is increasingly in units that are geographically dispersed and communicate through electronic media. The basis to expect that trust increases in its effects on performance in such virtual teams has been taken up by numerous investigators. In this chapter, a basis to represent trust in a framework of information exchange in virtual teams is introduced. In the chapter trust is framed in terms of equity judgments from member observations of the distributions of evaluations across members that differ in the number of ideas and evaluations they offer and in their status in the team. In particular, trust is driven by observations of the distribution of negative evaluations. If evaluations are observed to be distributed more in proportion to a member’s status, then his or her initiations of information type’s judgments of equity are expected to decrease. A closed form for the representation of trust in terms of information exchange and status weights of team members is offered. The distribution of negative evaluations across team members relative to their initiation of information types and status of a member was explicitly represented in this form. In the form, trust is increased when evaluations are distributed more in relation to the information that is initiated than the status of a member.
