Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Toolkit For Managing Virtual Teams, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

Leaders in multi-national organisations have to work with team members in many different locations, with few if any face to face meetings. This poses problems for leaders used to working face to face. This article briefly reviews the literature, finding some consensus that leadership is significant in managing virtual teams but that the practices adopted by leaders need to be adapted, that trust is one of the key predictors of success, and that technology and training also help improve performance of virtual teams.

To Trust Or To Monitor: A Dynamic Analysis, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In a principal-agent framework, principals can mitigate moral hazard problems not only through extrinsic incentives such as monitoring, but also through agents’ intrinsic trustworthiness. Their relative usage, however, changes over time and varies across societies. This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon by endogenizing agent trustworthiness as a response to potential returns. When monitoring becomes relatively cheaper over time, agents acquire lower trustworthiness, which may actually drive up the overall governance cost in society. Across societies, those giving employees lower weights in choosing governance methods tend to have higher monitoring intensities and lower trust. These results are consistent with the …

Cross-Cultural Differences In The Development Of Trust In Relational Service Exchange - An Empirical Analysis Of The Moderating Role Of Uncertainly Avoidance, Jan H. Schumann, Florian Wangenheim, Zhilin Yang, Sandra Praxmarer, Fernando Jinenez, Marcin Komor, G Shainesh

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Customer trust is of high importance for customer relationship management in services.

While service providers increasingly provide their services globally, little is known about cross-cultural differences in the way customers develop trust in their service providers. The present paper fills this void by providing a research model that builds on the idea that cross-cultural differences in the development of trust can be explained by moderating effects of uncertainty avoidance. This view is supported by results of an empirical analysis conducted in the banking context in six countries. Managerial implications are derived and directions for further research are proposed.

Oxytocin Increases Generosity In Humans, Paul J. Zak, Angela Stanton, Sheila Ahmadi

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Human beings routinely help strangers at costs to themselves. Sometimes the help offered is generous-offering more than the other expects. The proximate mechanisms supporting generosity are not well-understood, but several lines of research suggest a role for empathy. In this study, participants were infused with 40 IU oxytocin (OT) or placebo and engaged in a blinded, one-shot decision on how to split a sum of money with a stranger that could be rejected. Those on OT were 80% more generous than those given a placebo. OT had no effect on a unilateral monetary transfer task dissociating generosity from altruism. OT …

The Relational Foundations Of Strategic Choice In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Philip Smith

Mara Olekalns

Representing negotiations as social exchanges highlights negotiators’ implicit obligations to honor exchanges and the risk that they will fail to do so. Based on their representation of the underlying relationship, negotiators are oriented to one of four relational risks (failures in reliability, predictability, benevolence or integrity). The salience of a specific relational risk shifts negotiators’ strategic focus and elicits a distinct strategic cluster (deterrence, co-ordination, obligation, collaboration) aimed at offsetting or neutralizing these relational risks.

Resolving The Empty Core: Trust As A Determinant Of Outcomes In Three-Party Negotiations, Mara Olekalns, Feyona Lau, Philip Smith

Mara Olekalns

This research examined how trust affected resource allocation in a 3-party negotiation. Negotiators were presented with an empty core problem in which their theoretical share of resources exceeded the resources available for distribution. We tested which of three components of trust – reliability, predictability and empathy – predicted negotiators’ outcomes. We distinguished between absolute and relative trust. We found that relative trust was a more consistent predictor of individual outcomes than absolute trust and that the most trusted party in a network obtained the highest individual outcomes. This finding highlights the importance of social context in shaping trust judgements. The …

Loose With The Truth: Predicting Deception In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Philip Smith

Mara Olekalns

Using a simulated, two-party negotiation, we examined how characteristics of the actor, target, and situation affected deception. To trigger deception, we used an issue that had no value for one of the two parties (indifference issue). We found support for an opportunistic betrayal model of deception: deception increased when the other party was perceived as benevolent, trustworthy and as having integrity. Negotiators’ goals also affected the use of deception. Individualistic, cooperative and mixed dyads responded differently to information about the other party’s trustworthiness, benevolence and integrity when deciding to either misrepresent or leverage their indifference issue. Mixed dyads displayed opportunistic …