Trust among team members is a crucial variable for the success of a project. Consequently, trust has been studied extensively in all kinds of teams, including global virtual teams. This paper examines how trust is established in offshore outsourcing engagements. As a consequence, constructs to measure dyadic trust, namely the trustee’s ability, integrity, and benevolence, and related trust concepts such as swift trust, reference trust, companion trust, competency trust, and commitment trust, are well formed and widely accepted. The objective of this paper is to empirically assess trust building in today’s common work setting in which an offshore vendor performs information technology (IT) tasks for an onshore client.

The author performed an ethnographic study to understand how “the three pillars of trust,” ability, integrity, and benevolence, played out between the actors of two organizational entities: a Danish media company and an Indian IT vendor. Because some offshore vendor employees were collocated with the client workers at the client site and most were located offshore in India, the author studied how trust was developed in two modes of work. The study found that 1) actors from both organizations found it hard to make direct contact, for example, via a phone call until they met their counterpart face to face; 2) the Danish employees viewed vendor employees who had worked onshore with them as more technically proficient and knowledgeable than their offsite colleagues who had not, whereas all Indian workers felt their Danish counterparts were very knowledgeable; and 3) the Danish employees questioned the integrity of offsite workers who had not worked onshore with them, whereas both onshore and offshore Indian workers perceived the Danish counterparts as possessing high integrity. The conclusion of the paper is that colocation, even for a short duration, facilitates trust, and this trust is carried over offshore.

This finding is not new or surprising; virtual teams literature recommends that, before starting a project, team members meet face to face in order to get to know each other and reduce the social distance between participants. I also feel that the unit of analysis should be teams and not organization entities.