Trust Consensus Within Culturally Diverse Teams: A Multistudy Investigation

Abstract

Despite tremendous progress toward understanding trust within teams, research has predominately conceptualized team trust as a shared group construct, focusing almost exclusively on trust magnitude (i.e., mean level of trust) while ignoring trust dispersion (i.e., within-team differences in trust). As a result, we know little about this critical property of team trust, its determinants, and independent impact on team outcomes. We address this limitation by examining “team trust consensus”—a configural group construct capturing the extent to which team members share their levels of trust in the team—as a variable of theoretical and empirical interest in its own right. Cross-sectional data from a work team sample (Study 1, N = 120) provide initial support for our propositions that national culture diversity negatively affects trust consensus and that trust consensus positively affects team performance. Expanding on these findings, we propose a contingency model in which the negative impact of national culture diversity is mitigated by team virtuality and collective leadership. Multiwave data from an MBA team sample (Study 2, N = 95) offer support for these propositions and replicate the positive direct effect of trust consensus on team performance. Our findings indicate trust consensus is an important predictor of team performance and provide unique insight into the factors that jointly influence trust consensus within teams.