Managing Trust in Swiftly Starting Action Teams

Abstract

Often in both industry and government, collaborative efforts come together and disband quickly, or occur in response to a very short-term problem. Sometimes in these situations, the interacting parties have no prior history with each other or any knowledge of each other, and very little time for building trust before the task is concluded; however, trust usually plays a most critical role. Therefore, it is important to examine the development of trust in quickly formed collaborations. The proposed symposium will discuss the current state of the trust literature and propose a theoretical framework of trust in Swiftly sTarting Action Teams (STAT) to guide potential training manipulations implemented within a training cycle designed to improve team performance. In addition, the symposium will entail a first hand account of how trust applied in the field and describe some of the empirical evidence regarding the impact of trust on team performance in complex, high stake environments.