SummaryThis research develops and investigates the concept of reciprocal trust between interacting teams. Reciprocal trust is defined as the trust that results when a party observes the actions of another and reconsiders one's trust-related attitudes and subsequent behaviors based on those observations. Twenty-four teams of systems analysis and design students were involved in a 6-week controlled field study focused on the development of an information systems project. Each team was responsible for both developing a system (development role) and for supervising the development of a system by another team (management role). Risk-taking actions exhibited by one team in an interacting pair were found to predict the other team's trustworthiness perceptions and subsequent trust. The level of trust formed in turn predicted the team's subsequent risk-taking behaviors with respect to the other team. This pattern of reciprocal trust repeated itself as the teams continued to interact over the duration of the project, thus supporting our model of reciprocal trust. Findings also indicate that trust and trust formation can occur at the team level.

alliance, collaboration, collaborative stra- tegic management, collaborative strategy, cooperation, inter-organizational relations, partnership, sustainability, sustainable development,

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Interfaces now employ a variety of media-rich, social, and advanced decision-making components, including recommendation agents (RA) designed to assist users with their tasks. Social presence has been identified as a key consideration in website design to overcome the lack of warmth, social cues, and face-to-face interaction, but few studies have investigated the interface features that may increase social presence. Recent research on RAs has similarly acknowledged social presence as a key factor in the design of online RAs and in building trust in this technology, but there has been limited empirical work on the topic. In this study an experiment was conducted to explore how social technology cues, media capabilities, and individual differences influence social presence and trust in an RA. RA personality (extraversion), vividness (text, voice, and animation), and computer playfulness were found to influence social presence, with social presence serving in a mediating role and increasing user trust in the RA. Vividness also had a moderating effect on the relationship between RA extraversion and social presence such that increased levels of vividness strengthen this relationship.

The concept of collective efficacy within virtual teams has yet to be studied. This study developed and rigorously validated a domain-specific measure of collective efficacy, entitled virtual team efficacy, within a comprehensive research framework. Over a two-year period we collected field study data from multiple samples of information systems project teams-in all, 52 virtual teams comprising 318 students from the United States, Great Britain, and Hong Kong. As we hypothesized, group potency and computer collective efficacy act as antecedents to virtual team efficacy, and virtual team efficacy is in turn predictive of perceptual and objective measures of performance. Further, consistent with efficacy theory, we also find that virtual team efficacy acts on performance outcomes through specific mediating processes. This paper contributes to the academic and practitioner communities by providing a comprehensive model of virtual team efficacy and performance and by providing validated instrumentation that can be immediately applied during further research in this area.KEY WORDS AND PHRASES: collective efficacy, global virtual teams, virtual team efficacy, virtual teams.