Is Trust Always Better than Distrust? The Potential Value of Distrust in Newer Virtual Teams Engaged in Short-Term Decision-Making

Paul Benjamin Lowry (), Ryan M. Schuetzler (), Justin Scott Giboney () and Thomas A. Gregory ()
Additional contact information
Paul Benjamin Lowry: City University of Hong Kong
Ryan M. Schuetzler: University of Arizona
Justin Scott Giboney: University at Albany, State University of New York
Thomas A. Gregory: Georgia State University

Group Decision and Negotiation, 2015, vol. 24, issue 4, No 10, 723-752

Abstract: Abstract The debate on the benefits of trust or distrust in groups has generated a substantial amount of research that points to the positive aspects of trust in groups, and generally characterizes distrust as a negative group phenomenon. Therefore, many researchers and practitioners assume that trust is inherently good and distrust is inherently bad. However, recent counterintuitive evidence obtained from face-to-face (FtF) groups indicates that the opposite might be true; trust can prove detrimental, and distrust instrumental, to decision-making in groups. By extending this argument to virtual teams (VTs), we examined the value of distrust for VTs completing routine and non-routine decision tasks, and showed that the benefits of distrust can extend to short-term VTs. Specifically, VTs seeded with distrust significantly outperformed all control groups in a non-routine decision-making task. In addition, we present quantitative evidence to show that the decision task itself can significantly affect the overall levels of trust/distrust within VTs. In addition to its practical and research implications, the theoretical contribution of our study is that it extends to a group level, and then to a VT setting, a theory of distrust previously tested in the psychology literature in the context of completing non-routine and routine decision tasks at an individual level.

Keywords: Trust; Distrust; Virtual teams; Team performance; Decision making; Decision quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10726-014-9410-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:grdene:v:24:y:2015:i:4:d:10.1007_s10726-014-9410-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10726/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10726-014-9410-x

Access Statistics for this article

Group Decision and Negotiation is currently edited by Gregory E. Kersten

More articles in Group Decision and Negotiation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().