A longitudinal case study on risk factor in trust development of facilitated collaboration

Abstract

Computer-mediated collaboration is widely used in various organizations. Trust has proved to have an influence on online collaboration. This paper aims to conduct an in-depth investigation on an important trust factor during online collaboration, which is risk. The research samples were collected from Chinese part-time MBA students. They were invited to use the group support system (GSS) designed under the theory of facilitated collaboration with the thinkLets method to support the online collaboration. During this longitudinal research, questionnaires were collected at three stages, namely, at the beginning, during and at the end of the experiment, interviews were also conducted. Results show the level of trust was raised over time. Among all the trust factors, risk shows the most significant change, and the level of risk is decreased. Finally, the correlation analysis was conducted to detect the relationship between risk and trust in facilitated collaboration.