What factors causes the lack of trust in project management teams Essay

What factors causes the lack of trust in project management teams - Essay Example Today most of the organizations embrace the notion of groups or teams. Teams have become the core unit in many organizations. Part of this based on the fact that groups are effective in solving problems and learn more rapidly than individuals. The above definition of Team itself explains that a team could be formed for the specific purpose that may be to execute and manage a specific project or projects. This team can be called as project management team. Teams are particularly important when problems and decisions involve very uncertain, complex and important situations and when the potential of conflict is great. Teams are clearly more appropriate when there is not an immediate time pressure. (Ware, 1993, 1994). But teams can also bring about the worst in us. Teams can result in a situation where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Teams can be a big waste of time and energy, can enforce norms of low productivity and can exploit, stress and frustrate members. Trust plays t he main role in functioning of any project management team. If the trust among team members is low then timely completion of projects and proper functioning of the team could not be assured.During the last few years there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the importance of trust in business interactions within the management and organizational literature. (Kramer& Tyler, 1994. Mayer, David &Schorman, 1995). Trust enables cooperation and becomes the means for complexity reduction even in situations where individual must act with uncertainty because they are in possession of ambiguous and incomplete information. It is not therefore surprising that in the current age of global and digital economy and virtuality (Tapscot, 1996) there has been an enormous interest in trust. According to Platt, Trust is essential to any team whether virtual or real. Real teams may interact day to day and chances of loosing trust may be lower but for the virtual teams where the possibility of day t o day interaction or face-to face interactions are almost negligible, possibility of loosing trust is much higher. Trust is a state of a positive confidence through subjective expectation regarding the behaviour of somebody or something in a situation, which entails risk to trusting party (Baba, 1999). It is a dynamic and emergent social relationship that develops as participants interact with each other over time and depending on situation. Jarvenppa and Leidner have conducted one of the most detailed researches, which studied Trust and Teams thus far. It highlighted significant difference in the behaviour and strategies between high and low trust teams emphasize on the clarity of roles and responsibilities among team members. Panteli and Duncan in their study of virtual teams, projects managed by virtual organizations, which involves a team of geographically far off located contractual employees, finds that the content of communication both formal and informal as well as frequency helps in building and maintaining an interactive social situation and can act as the frame for reference in constructing the trust relationship. Finally after going through different studies we can classify the different factors, which causes lack of trust among project team members. Shared goals are and should be one of the important aspects of the project management team, which cannot be taken for granted. Lack of trust may be due to lack of awareness about shared goals among team members. Generally most of the members of the team may or do not know the goals of the team and everybody have their understanding and perceptions about goals which brings distrust among team member