A Comparison of Relational and Trust Training Techniques for Virtual Team Communication: How Much Training is Enough?

Abstract

As virtual teams become common place in organizations as well as educational institutions concern over preparing members to work more effectively in a virtual environment raises. There are many factors that can affect how well team members communicate and how well they work together. Two of these factors are relational links and trust. Both of these factors are summarized from the current literature and we report on a study that compared training techniques based on both of these factors. Forty eight teams interacted over a semester to work on a series of tasks. Two different training programs were established based on the relational links and trust literature and administered to subsets of teams. A comparison was made on the effectiveness of each of the training techniques as well as compared to no training.