Trust and Control Case Study Analysis
In his case study entitled “Striking a Balance between Trust and Control in a Virtual Organization,” Michael Gallivan writes about his theory that control can be a substitute for trust in virtual organizations: “I argue that, given a set of practices to ensure the control, efficiency, predictability, and calculability of processes and outcomes in virtual organizations, effective performance may occur in the absence of trust (2001).” A virtual organization, according to Gallivan, is one which “allow[s] certain processes to be performed outside the traditional bounds of the firm (paraphrasing Lucas, 1996, p. 280).” The author believes the Open Source Software movement presents the perfect types of virtual …show more content…
280)…” There are five main styles of trust one of which, swift trust, is a term used to describe the trust within virtual organizations and teams. Trust has been seen as extremely important within virtual organizations because it is considered to be the only way to deal with members whose work a manager cannot control directly. The author believes that the members of a virtual organization can be controlled through certain control mechanisms. Control can even lead to trust developing according to Gallivan. In the case studies analyzed for his paper, trust was rarely mentioned: “Five of the nine studies lacked any reference to trust at all, whereas the other four studies included only a few references to trust (Gallivan, 2001, p. 291).” Control was mentioned much more often than Trust in all of the papers analyzed. Although control was not always obtained through efficiency, predictability, and calculability, its presence was maintained through other …show more content…
Allowing another person to control one’s work can be daunting. Without trust, a person would likely not allow another to have any sort of control over their work. Due to their inherently negative nature, threats and sanctions work as control mechanisms, but they may also keep the best people from joining a team in the first place. Consciously choosing to voluntarily enter the team creating or contribute to an OSS requires at least a low level of trust. Most people would not knowingly enter an enterprise with a person they do not trust. In that respect, OSS projects and virtual organizations are no different than other
In his case study entitled “Striking a Balance between Trust and Control in a Virtual Organization,” Michael Gallivan writes about his theory that control can be a substitute for trust in virtual organizations: “I argue that, given a set of practices to ensure the control, efficiency, predictability, and calculability of processes and outcomes in virtual organizations, effective performance may occur in the absence of trust (2001).” A virtual organization, according to Gallivan, is one which “allow[s] certain processes to be performed outside the traditional bounds of the firm (paraphrasing Lucas, 1996, p. 280).” The author believes the Open Source Software movement presents the perfect types of virtual …show more content…
280)…” There are five main styles of trust one of which, swift trust, is a term used to describe the trust within virtual organizations and teams. Trust has been seen as extremely important within virtual organizations because it is considered to be the only way to deal with members whose work a manager cannot control directly. The author believes that the members of a virtual organization can be controlled through certain control mechanisms. Control can even lead to trust developing according to Gallivan. In the case studies analyzed for his paper, trust was rarely mentioned: “Five of the nine studies lacked any reference to trust at all, whereas the other four studies included only a few references to trust (Gallivan, 2001, p. 291).” Control was mentioned much more often than Trust in all of the papers analyzed. Although control was not always obtained through efficiency, predictability, and calculability, its presence was maintained through other …show more content…
Allowing another person to control one’s work can be daunting. Without trust, a person would likely not allow another to have any sort of control over their work. Due to their inherently negative nature, threats and sanctions work as control mechanisms, but they may also keep the best people from joining a team in the first place. Consciously choosing to voluntarily enter the team creating or contribute to an OSS requires at least a low level of trust. Most people would not knowingly enter an enterprise with a person they do not trust. In that respect, OSS projects and virtual organizations are no different than other