Removing barriers to trust in distributed teams: understanding cultural differences and strengthening social ties

Geographically distributed software development teams face communication and collaboration challenges that otherwise do not occur when engineers are collocated. There has been extensive research on the topic of trust as it is imperative in a collaborative environment. This paper takes trust research to a new level by addressing two attributes of trust-building that distributed development teams encounter when working together. We describe how underlying differences in social and cultural norms affect a distributed development team's effectiveness. We present study data from interviews and observations with four software teams at Microsoft doing distributed development work that have team members located in Europe and the United States. Our study demonstrates that openly recognizing cultural differences and intentionally strengthening social ties among team members are criteria for building trust in distributed software teams and, if not addressed, will erode a distributed team's ability to communicate and effectively work together. We further articulate how social ties may influence collaboration in distributed teams. Finally, we provide examples of differences in social and cultural norms in distributed software teams and demonstrate how carefully cultivated personal relationships contribute to a distributed team's success and on-time performance.