Building Trust in Teams: Engaging Less Conscientious Team Members through Team Workload-Sharing

Members of teams act as trustors, judging the trustworthiness of their teammates who are the trustees or targets of trust. Trustees who are less conscientious may be viewed as less trustworthy. But, we identify a team-based solution to engage less-conscientious teammates, which removes the adverse influence of low conscientiousness on perceived trustworthiness. Study 1 finds that team members have, on average, higher perceptions of their teammates’ trustworthiness when workload in the team is equitably shared and not imbalanced. Furthermore, it suggests that team workload sharing provides a way to ameliorate a lack of trust in low conscientious teammates. That is, team workload sharing moderates the link between trustee conscientiousness and perceived trustworthiness: in teams with high levels of workload sharing, less conscientious trustees are judged to be as trustworthy as their more conscientious peers. Study 2 replicates these findings and, unlike Study 1, it provides a clear main effect of trustee conscientiousness on perceived trustworthiness, and it reveals differences in the magnitude of the hypothesized effects at different periods of a team’s existence and for different dimensions of perceived trustworthiness. We conclude by suggesting strategies that can increase perceptions of trustworthiness within firms by using team processes that promote trustworthy behaviors.