Research on teams has overwhelmingly presented trust (based on perceptions of the team’s ability, integrity, and benevolence) as a positive and required antecedent of team effectiveness, proposing that trust linkages make it possible for team members to better communicate and coordinate their efforts. This positive conceptualization of trust holds even for groups that have just formed and begun working together, as such groups develop trust in one another (based mainly on institutional, dispositional, and cognitive proxies for ability, integrity, and benevolence) rapidly in order to complete their goals together, referred to in the literature as swift trust. This dissertation proposes that high levels of trust early in team tenure can cause teams to lag behind in performance when compared to teams who build trust more slowly. In addition, this dissertation examines the reciprocal relationship between trust and performance over time, as performance episodes provide information on ability, integrity, and benevolence to the team. By observing and surveying a set of 96 teams working on a multiple-step project over the course of 15 weeks, I was able to determine that demographic similarity and trust propensity predict trust early in team tenure, and that teams with high levels of this early trust produced lower overall performance than did teams who built trust more slowly. I also found that the variance in contribution toward performance within the team negatively predicts subsequent trust in the team, and that trust predicts subsequent effectiveness of team processes. On the other hand, team performance does not predict subsequent trust in the team, indicating that team members may not use performance information as an indicator of the ability, integrity, and benevolence of their team. While high trust early in team tenure was detrimental to performance, trust late in team tenure allowed teams to better translate their past performance into high subsequent performance. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and propose future research directions in the study of a more complex relationship between trust and performance in teams over time.
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