Virtually, you are there! exploring the teamwork challenges to swift trust formation when working in global virtual team

Due to the nature of the GVT work structure in which people are unconstrained by geographic boundaries, teams must also cope with conflicting cultural values and time zone differences. This factor creates many challenges, in particular with a group of people who are strangers to one another and has no historical background of working together. The main purpose of this exploratory study is to highlight the challenges of swift trust formation within GVTs and to present the teamwork-related issues involved in globally distributed collaboration. We conducted two focus group interviews to develop a preliminary understanding of the phenomenon based on the Tuckman and Jensen (1997) teamwork model. This data yielded important insights into the initial process of teamwork and swift trust formation. Based on our findings, team members experienced key challenges such as delayed communication due to time differences, misunderstanding of tasks assigned, technical problems with the use of varied collaborative tools, work attitude, lack of responsibility and motivation among teams and difficulty to establish relationships.