Nowaday, there are lots of demands to organize a temporary team because it is the consequence for organizations to answer the challenge of the fast changing environment. Temporary teams can complete tasks and accomplish goals swiftly and effectively. However, because of its uniqueness of organizational structure, temporary teams also give us some management challenges, especially for trust building. With the theory of swift trust, all of these challenges get easy to be resolved.
Virtuality has become the buzzword. Organizations have geographically diversified to a large extent after the dissemination of the Information and Communication Technology. Most corporations today, it is possible to have teams with members in different geographical locations. People are highly reliance on the Information and Communication Technology (ex. Online, Phones, Computers). Increasing virtuality helps in eliminating the need for teams to be collocated. Some teams communicate face-to-face for a short while and then use information technology (virtually) for future team work. Virtuality is a current topic in the literature on organizational researches. Though, there is less research which makes attempts to develop the influence that virtuality has in the temporary teams, especially in the founder teams.
This study aims to investigate the influence that a variety of antecedents, like disposition to trust, communication, task interdependence, role clarify, have on swift trust in founder team. Then, we try to investigate the mediation effect of swift trust in the relationship between the antecedents and team effectiveness. We also try to verify the moderated mediation effect of team virtuality that occurs in the relationship between the antecedents, swift trust and team effectiveness.
In order to do the research above, certain model and corresponding hypothesis have been built on the theoretical framework of factors for swift trust, team effectiveness, team virtuality and the earlier studies in the field. The valid data has been collected from 224 respondents, and the questions regarding the variables in the research are all designed to be answered by team members, but the empirical study used the score that aggregated by each team. Therefore we first checked if it is possible to aggregated individual scores into team scores by calculating ICC(1), ICC(2) and rwg(j), and the results are all in the reasonable ranges.
As the final results, swift trust has significant mediating effet on the relationship between its an antecedents and team effectiveness. Furthermore, the results shows that the indirect effect where communication and task interdependence influence team effectiveness through swift trust will be decreased when team virtuality was at high level. Based on these result, we also debate on the implications of the research and several suggestions are made for the future researches.