| Under the context of globalization, virtual teams could integrate intelligence resources within or among enterprises cross time, space and organization boundaries, and therefore been wildly used. How to facilitate virtual teams is the focus concern of researchers and managers. Communication technologies as the basic feature of virtual teams determine the communication qualities of virtual teams' process. And the trust and conflict in team process are the key factors which determine whether the team could exist in harmony. Based on IPO model, we use experiment research method to explore the impact of communication technologies to trust and conflict at different development stage of virtual teams, and also explore the complex interaction during team process.First the concepts of trust, conflict and communication media are defined, and relevant researches are reviewed. Then, based on TTF, media theories and research results of virtual teams, the hypothesis and research model are proposed. Experiment adopts 2×2 factor design(text and audio×early stage and later stage of virtual teams). The analysis of data collected by web questionnaires show that in the early stage audio teams experience more relationship conflict and lower trust compare with text teams, the difference of task conflict between two kinds of teams is not significant. In the later stage, the impact of technologies to trust and conflict is not significant. The alteration of technologies leads an increase of relationship conflict. Performance in early stage impacts the conflict and trust in later stage significantly. The moderate effect of trust to the relationship between task and relationship conflict are verified under virtual context. The analysis of communication records shows that the degree to which team members familiar with technologies is an important factor that influences the effectiveness of communication technologies. Finally, research results are analyzed and discussed. |
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