LA TOPONIMIA Y EL MAPU ÜY

The construction industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a multibillion dollar industry, contributing approximately 8% to the nation’s GDP(Ailabouni, Painting, & Ashton, 2009). Construction project teams are increasingly utilising virtual project (distributed) teams for delivering projects (Henderson, 2008; Ramalingam et al., 2014) due to the pressure from globalisation. It has been understood that implementing virtual project(distributed) teams successfully within the construction context requires an in- depth understanding of the unique challenges that are not necessarily similar to the challenges encountered in traditional teams (Hosseini & Chileshe, 2013). Even though

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there are numerous challenges involved in the virtual project teams as mentioned in section 2.6, the most important factor that was argued to have a strong impact on virtual team effectiveness is trust (Brahm & Kunze, 2012; Nandhakumar & Baskerville, 2006).

The construction industry consists of many stages of projects starting from pre-bid engineering, estimation, detailed engineering, procurement, construction and commission. Each of these stages does not work in isolation. The information sharing is needed at every stage of the project which is not possible unless the team members have trust in fellow mates. When people trust one another, they believe that others are willing and able to share their knowledge, and that they will develop an obligation to share (Staples & Webster, 2008). As a result, they will share knowledge in order not to violate that obligation, and this will eventually lead to virtual team effectiveness (Pangil & Chan, 2014). The delivery of promised work is being dictated by the ability of the team members and this is one of the key component for a successful virtual project team. This delivery of work depends on the associations among the team members as lot of information sharing is required to run the teams successfully. This information sharing happens only when the team members trust each other to share the information on time and with sufficient quality (Jarvenpaa et al., 1998). Therefore, trust has become a key research area within construction management, as well as in the wider business and management literature. Chen, C.*, & Messner, J. (2010) and Joseph (2005) mentioned that in construction industry, the challenge of building trust, team identity and team cohesiveness has to be critically evaluated in order for the successful operations of virtual project team.

Trust has been defined as the “willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party, based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the person in whom trust is placed, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party” (Mayerson, et al. 1996, p.712). Mayer, Davis & Schoorman (1995) defined trust in terms of the faith and belief in another individual or group that they will fulfill expectations in the future. Trust is the most difficult issue associated with virtual teams (Haywood, 1998). Trust can depend on situations and have its limitations.

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In some relationships, trust is only dependent on simple basic variables but as relationships mature and members get to know each other, individuals learn to trust or distrust the team members according to their characteristics (Lewicki, McAllister & Bie, 1998).

A number of studies have highlighted how trust is the factor with a noticeable effect on the performance of virtual team members (Henttonen & Blomqvist, 2005; Khan, 2012; Malhotra et al., 2007). Trust is found to be very critical to effective team processes and performance (Dirks & Ferrin, 2001; Kanawattanachai & Yoo, 2002; Kiffin-Petersen, 2004). Building trust is the most difficult task. It is probably the most complicated issue in forming a successful and effective team (Zaheer, McEvily & Perrone, 1998). As the teams are globally distributed, trust must be earned in order for the team to work (Lurey & Raisingham, 2001). The trust and relationships between group members results in the increase of creativity and critical thinking. It also helps in creating a more positive environment (Reina & Reina, 1999). Kramer (1999) points out that trust encourages members to devote time to projects, keep their focus on joint objectives, help each other, and work harder. Research shows that virtual teams that maintain high trust relationships produce higher-quality work. (Nemiro J, 2008)

Trust is especially important in cross-disciplinary work setups, as those during the design phase of a construction project. This is due to the fact that many sub-tasks are interdependent on each other for their execution. Therefore the members are required to trust the other team members’ competence to perform the interdependent tasks in order to meet the client’s expectations of the final product (Zolin et al., 2004). Also the trust greatly impacts knowledge sharing among virtual project teams (Uden & Naaranoja 2007; Brahm & Kunze, 2012; Nandhakumar & Baskerville, 2006). The absence of trust leads to greater dissatisfaction among the team members that greatly affect the performance of the team (Sidawi et al., 2012).

Studies by Jarvenpaa, Knolle Leidner (1998) suggested that the trust in geographically distributed virtual project teams are very fragile compared to the trust between members

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of co-located teams. Kimble (2011) suggested that virtual team failure is directly related to the difficulties of building trust and positive relationships across the three boundaries of geographical distance, time zones, and cultural differences. Al Momani (1996) investigated the causes of delay on 130 public projects in Jordan. The results indicated that the main causes of delay in the construction of public projects relate to project designers, user changes, weather, site conditions, late deliveries, and economic conditions. They found that the team members’ behaviour towards each other delayed the projects as the members were not sharing information at the right point of time.

Based on the extensive review of 149 research papers, it has been found that 90% of the research on trust in virtual teams is being done in industry environment where the major consideration was on trust between suppliers, contractors and owners of the construction company (Kadefors, 2004; E Lau & Rowlinson, 2011; Ellen Lau & Rowlinson, 2009a; Pinto et al., 2009). It has been figured out that trust among team members of virtual project team has not been analysed in industry / field settings especially in Construction sector whereas much work has already been published on open source software development teams (Ho & Richardson, 2013) and for online communities (Lee et al., 2014). Considering the above discussed scenario, this research is designed to understand the various factors affecting trust in virtual project teams in construction sector of the Middle East.