Exploring the Impact of Non-Verbal Cues on Trust and Creative Performance in Virtual Teams
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2023-06-29
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en
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The surge in remote work recently has necessitated a greater reliance on virtual team collaboration, including creative tasks. As creativity drives innovation and is vital in a hyper-competitive environment, understanding how virtual teamwork impacts team creativity becomes essential. This study focuses on the role and impact of non-verbal cues on creativity and trust among team members in virtual environments. Advances in communication technologies have significantly improved the richness of virtual communication, sparking interest in studying the effects of non-verbal cues. An online experiment involving 34 groups of three participants was conducted, requiring completion of a creative task under conditions with and without non-verbal cues. The study revealed that non-verbal cues significantly influenced affective trust but not cognitive trust. Further, the absence of non-verbal cues significantly affected the creative performance of the groups. Interestingly, groups without access to non-verbal cues generated a higher fluency and uniqueness of ideas and increased novelty. However, the absence of non-verbal cues negatively influenced the perceived usefulness of ideas. Affective trust, although playing a role in mediating the impact of some creative performance indicators, did not uniformly influence all measures of creativity. The findings suggest that while different forms of trust might influence the creative performance of online teams, non-verbal cues have a more direct and substantial impact on creative performance. The study invites reconsideration of existing virtual team protocols and encourages a rethinking of established assumptions about trust and non-verbal cues in virtual creative collaboration.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen