The effect of geographical separation, mediated communications, and culture, on tester team member trust of other information technology virtual project team members

The purpose of this study was to find evidence that employees in the project role of systems and software tester may experience less effect on their trust of team members in other project roles when working in a virtual team setting. In this study, the independent variables of geographic proximity, culture, and communications were studied as variables that may be analyzed to clarify findings regarding the effect of the independent variable employee role on the dependent variable trust. The sampling plan used a professional standards certification organization specialized in information technology practices online survey process to gather a sample size of 382 calculated at a 0.95 Confidence Level with a 0.05 confidence interval. Consistent with past research, when working in a setting that includes geographic separation, electronically mediated communication, and a culturally non-homogenous project teams, trust does appear to be impacted for some employee roles. An interesting finding in this research is the apparent indication that trust for the employee role tester is not statistically significantly affected by a virtual team setting as was noted in the research expectations. Contrary to the research expectation, responses to survey questions for the employee role tester consistently maintain a higher percent of agreement with the survey questions than do responses for employee roles other than that of tester. What appears most interesting in this research is the finding that for some employee roles other than that of tester trust appears to be affected negatively when working in the virtual project setting that includes the independent variables of geographic separation, communication, and culture.