Trust and conflict in virtual teams: An exploratory study

Abstract

The concept of "virtual organization" is more and more interesting in the literature especially focusing on virtual teams. There are two most important components within virtual teams: The organizational trust because of the decentralization and the increasing use of Information Technologies in order to share knowledge and information, and conflict management. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the trust topic and conflict in terms of factors and typologies of trust in virtual team organizations in order to understand context and individual factors of virtual collaborative relationships among employees geographically distributed and how these factors can affect conflict management within virtual teams regarding their own specific characteristics. © Springer-Verlag 2011.