Once broken, never fixed? the impact of culture and medium on repairing trust in CMC

Abstract

Communication in today's media choices of texts, tweets and posts remain influenced by who we are and our subjective context. Given globalization, distance education and diverse teams and workgroups, successful communicative interaction is facilitated by interpersonal trust, or the trust between conversational partners. When conflict erupts, as it will in relationships, in work groups and within organizations, the restoration of trust and stability is aided by one's personal analysis of internal and external factors. The objective of this study is to investigate how communication channels (IM and video) influence people from different cultures (China and the US) in trust development and trust reparation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.