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

Keywords

Trust, Distrust, Virtual teams, Team performance, Decision making, Decision quality

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.

Original Publication Citation

"Lowry, P. B., Schuetzler, R. M., Giboney, J. S., & Gregory, T. (2015) Is trust always better than distrust? The potential value of distrust in newer virtual teams engaged in short-term decision making. Group Decision and Negotiation, 24(4), pp. 723–753. "

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2014-08-27

Permanent URL

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/8394

Publisher

Group Decision and Negotiation

Language

English

College

Marriott School of Business

Department

Information Systems

University Standing at Time of Publication

Assistant Professor

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