Trust and Team Performance: A Meta-Analysis of Main Effects, Moderators, and Covariates

This paper discusses how trust between members has a positive impact on a team’s performance. It also shows the major principles that have an influence on the enormity of this association and the conditions under which intrateam task is most effective.

Running head: ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
Organizational Behaviour
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
Trust is a crucial ingredient to facilitate positive team performance. The purpose of this
paper is to show how organizational research, studies trust as a construct and how trust between
members has a positive impact on a team’s performance. The paper also tries to show the major
principles that has an influence on the enormity of this association and the conditions under
which intrateam task is most effective.
Trust is a basis of any relationship. It is intrinsic to any work relationship. Trust between
members of an organization is related and has a positive effect on a team’s performance.
Intrateam task refers to the collective trust that team members have on each other (DeJong et al.
2016). Trust helps a person to mitigate the uncertainty and vulnerability felt towards their
teammates thereby enabling them to work effectively, efficiently and cohesively as a team. A
sense of distrust leads members of an organization to lose focus on the goals of an organization
and instead focus on their own personal goals. When task interdependence is high, teamwork is
essential for attaining team goals and therefore will have a strong effect on the performance of a
team. Intrateam task is stronger when task interdependence is high rather than when it is low.
When virtuality is on the rise and is high, the relationship between the trust of members in an
organization and the performance of a team is stronger (DeJong et al. 2016). In addition, when
temporal stability is high, the relationship between intrateam task is also very strong.
The strength of the article lies in the fact that it shows how intrateam trust has the ability
to mitigate uncertainty and vulnerability between members of a team and how this leads to a
better collaboration, communication and cooperation between team members. The limitations of
the article include the fact that the studies that were conducted were dependent on coding which
did not always assure accuracy and feasibility. Another limitation of this article arises from the

2ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
fact that majority of the studies that were conducted were cross-sectional and non experimental.
This prevents a person from understanding the complete effect of trust on a team’s performance.

3ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
REFERENCES:
De Jong, B. A., Dirks, K. T., & Gillespie, N. (2016). Trust and team performance: A meta-
analysis of main effects, moderators, and covariates. Journal of Applied Psychology,
101(8), 1134.
Moyo, D. U. D. U., Chan, K., & Waveren, C. V. (2015). The Impact of Intra-Organizational
Networks on Learning and Performance At Individual and Team Level. In International
Association for Management of Technology IAMOT 2015 Conference Proceedings (pp.
357-373).