Keywords
Trust; teams; diversity; team performance; diverse teams
Abstract
Trust is gaining attention for its benefits to both teams and organizations as a whole (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012). The difficulty of building it in comparison to the ease of destroying it calls for a deeper understanding of trust, as well as its relationship with critical team outcomes (Colquitt, LePine, Piccolo, Zapata, & Rich, 2012). Unfortunately, current research has progressed in a disjointed manner that requires the integration of findings before a more parsimonious and descriptive understanding of trust at the team-level can be developed. Beyond this basic understanding, research is needed to explore the nature of trust in teams comprised of diverse members, as multi-national, multi-cultural, and interdisciplinary teams are increasingly characterizing the modern landscape. Thus, this article uses meta-analytic techniques to examine the extent to which mutual trust can serve as an underlying mechanism that drives the diversity-team performance relationship. First, surface-level and deep-level diversity characteristics varied in their impact on trust. Value diversity emerged as the most detrimental, along with the moderating effect of time. Second, 95 independent samples comprising 5,721 teams emphasized the importance of trust to team performance with a moderate and positive relationship. Third, mediation analyses answered recent calls (e.g., van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007) to examine underlying mechanisms that can explain the diversity-outcomes relationship. This showed age, gender, value, and function diversity to be related to performance through mutual trust. Furthermore, this study explores whether contextual (e.g., team distribution) as well as measurement (e.g., referent) issues pose systematic differences in the diversity-trust and trust-performance relationships. Surprisingly, the construct of trust at the team-level proved to be generalizable across a number of unique conditions. In addition to this extensive quantitative review, implications and future research are discussed.
Notes
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Graduation Date
2015
Semester
Summer
Advisor
Salas, Eduardo
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
College
College of Sciences
Department
Psychology
Degree Program
Psychology; Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
CFE0005792
URL
http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0005792
Language
English
Release Date
August 2016
Length of Campus-only Access
1 year
Access Status
Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)
Subjects
Dissertations, Academic -- Sciences; Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic
STARS Citation
Feitosa, Pereira Jennifer, "Can mutual trust explain the diversity-performance relationship? A meta-analysis" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1214.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/1214