During the three years I have been working on producing this doctoral dissertation I have on numerous occasions found myself in a situations, where fellow researchers have critically asked ”How do you know that trust is important?” when I have presented my research agenda.
Indeed, a substantial number of researchers interested in global software development and virtual teamwork adhere to grounded theory and as a consequence they would argue, as one did, that “You should start at a higher level and apply a grounded approach so you don’t risk forcing theory onto your empirical subject”. While I do believe that this is a noble idea, I am also convinced that it is practically impossible to detach oneself from earlier experiences – academic as well as practical. Therefore, let me start by outlining my own professional background.
I have been working in the IT-industry for quite a few years. Over the years I have been trusted with a variety of roles: First, helpdesk and support, later on business analysis, project management, enterprise architecture and even occasionally a bit of programming. Early 2009 I took up a new challenge, when I accepted an offer from my at that time employer, a leading financial institution in Denmark, to move to Bangalore in India to join a team of four other native Danish colleagues and eight Indians in the management team of the largest – both at that time and now almost six years later – offshore outsourcing engagement embarked upon by a Danish IT-organization.
During my expatriation to India I was heavily involved in the day-to-day management of the collaboration between the two organizations, including optimization of processes related allocation and de-allocation of Indian consultants, performance measurements as well as numerous other things relating to the overall collaboration. Furthermore, I was heading the expansion and daily management of a BPO (business process
outsourcing) function. As a natural consequence of my occupation I got a first hand understanding of the challenges related to collaborating across distance, culture, time zones and organizational boundaries; as well as a good taste of the differences between working and living in my home country of Denmark and in India.
After repatriating to Denmark I was put in charge of a team of twenty-five Indian consultants assigned to a department consisting of nearly hundred Danish employees. I remember my first meeting with the Senior Vice President, who was leading the department: He explained to me that they had – in accordance with the senior management’s strategy – been expanding the offshore team over the last three years and it had now grown to a size where there was one Indian consultant assigned to the department for every four Danish employees. He also voiced his concern that the Indian consultants were not performing adequately and that the Danes in the department were generally dissatisfied with their Indian “colleagues” as they found that the Indians did not take responsibility and that the time invested in knowledge sharing exceeded the output in a way where the majority of the Danish employees felt that “if I have to spend so much time specifying work for the Indians, I might as well do the whole task myself”. It sounded exactly like a challenge for me and I took the job.
I was charged with the overall responsibility for the performance of the Indian consultants in a staff-augmentation outsourcing engagement where the client side took all management responsibilities with regards to performance and the Indian consultants were considered “extra hands” – an extension to the Danish department, so to speak.
My job included allocating qualified Indian consultants for tasks and projects in the Danish organization and making sure that they performed as expected and in accordance with what was agreed. In some cases I was managing the tasks and projects they were assigned to and in other cases the day-to-day management resided under another member of the department’s management team in Denmark.
After embarking on my new job I quickly found out that what the Senior Vice President had told me was not at all an exaggeration. Most of the Danish employees I spoke to did nothing to conceal the fact that they would rather avoid working with the Indian consultants. On the other side the Indian consultants were disappointed that they were only assigned the most trivial tasks and that they were by and large treated as inferior by their Danish counterparts who were not perceived as helpful and who – in the eyes of the Indian consultants – would often just neglect emails from them. The Indians were often sitting idle waiting for something to do and despite the fact that the Danes – management as well as employees – knew of this, nothing was done. The one-to-five ratio had been dictated by the CIO’s office and it was quite simply easier just having twenty-five Indian consultants sitting idle than to put an effort into making good use of them.
During my stint as manager for the team I implemented a broad range of initiatives aimed at integrating the Indian consultants more in the department: I changed the way Danish employees and Indian consultants coordinated efforts; I took upon myself the responsibility for a large number of tasks in order to be able to get the Indian consultants in the loop and to integrate them in the department; I started communicating the strategies and visions of the department to the Indian consultants and urged the Senior Vice President to include the team of Indian consultants in department meetings which, as a consequence, were changed to being conducted in English instead of Danish and with video-support; and I started to introduce elaborate reports and assessments of the quality of tasks completed in order to make the contributions and qualities of the Indian consultants more transparent.
Over a period of fifteen months I was basically in the driving seat of a significant change in the way the offshore collaboration was executed on a day-to-day basis.
Gradually I saw how the negative stories about the Indians lack of competence faded and positive stories about their contribution emerged instead. Over this period of time
the work climate changed dramatically: The Indian consultants were to a larger degree considered a valuable asset and they were, themselves, telling me how they found the new responsibilities that were bestowed upon them motivating and how they were now happy to be a part of the department and saw a future for themselves in their current jobs.
What had changed? Why were the Danish employees all of a sudden talking about their Indian colleagues and acknowledging their competences and efforts? Indeed, I had ramped out a few of the Indian consultants, whom I did not believe were technically strong or communicatively capable to become a success in the department, but the vast majority of Indian consultants were the same as when I started. My assessment was, and is, that the most significant change was that I had successfully managed to redefine collaboration from something that was characterized by annoyance of the presence of “the strangers” to something characterized, at least to some extent, by group effort and a we-are-in-this-together mentality.
One late Thursday afternoon I was sitting in the office in Copenhagen when I overheard a conversation between some of my Danish colleagues. It was close to deadline of a new release – a situation all IT-professionals know is notoriously stressful. My Danish colleagues had found out that one of the Indian consultants had made a mistake, which could potentially delay the release. Their conversation was striking: There is no doubt in my mind that had the same situation occurred a year earlier the Danish employees would have been nagging about how the Indian consultant were not taking responsibility and were not capable of doing the job, but now it was all different: One of the Danish employees stated that it was really late in India (3.5 hour time difference) and that the Indian consultant had been working long hours. They all agreed that she had made a mistake but in the same breath acknowledged human fallibility and reasoned that while the mistake was indeed
serious and the Indian consultant was at fault, they should help her out, so she did not have to spend the whole night in office.
What happened? The Danish employees seemed to exhibit a sense of collegiality, they reasoned that the Indian consultant had done her best and furthermore that her normal performance was high and that she was a dependable person. This incident, as well as others, made me wonder what had changed. My conclusion was that we had managed to create a work environment where the Indian consultant’s efforts and abilities were rendered visible and that this change had caused a higher level of trust between the actors – and it lead me to conclude that trust seemed to be the differentiator.
Now, I have never been known as a strong finisher and at that time I felt that I had done my share of work. The Danish/Indian collaboration had changed a lot – and all to the better. Indeed, much more work could be done to further improve the collaboration, but I felt it was time to move on. Around the same time the opportunity to engage in research as a PhD fellow as Copenhagen Business School arose and I thought: Over the last couple of years I have been spending ninety percent of my time putting out fires and ten percent thinking about why offshore outsourcing is so difficult and how it can be improved. Why not turn the bucket around and spend ninety percent of my time on understanding the inherent difficulties of such collaboration and how it can be improved?
From the outset I knew that my project would be about trust in global collaboration and this brings me back to the critical question I started out this chapter by laying forth a question I have often been asked: “How do You know that trust is important?”
One could argue that I cannot know that trust (and trustworthiness) is relevant to study in the given empirical context beforehand. I disagree. The vast body of literature on trust (see Chapter II) argues that trust is necessary in all human endeavors. We simply cannot live productive lives without some level of trust in our surroundings – humans
as well as artifacts. Thus, trust and trustworthiness is of course also significant in the concrete empirical context I am studying: an offshore outsourcing collaboration between a Danish media company and an Indian IT-service provider with global presence. This does not suggest that trust and trustworthiness is a problem, in the mundane understanding of the word, in this specific context – not at all. But it does suggest that trust and trustworthiness is worth studying from a theoretical perspective as well as from a practical perspective: My own background as well as a vast body of literature (see for instance Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Rosen et al., 2005; Greenberg et al., 2007) suggests that building and sustaining trust in distributed team work is by no means a trivial matter.
Furthermore, I do not suggest that by studying trust and trustworthiness, I have chosen the most important and pressing issue in my specific empirical context. Arguably, deciding objectively on what is most important is impossible as the focus is relying on the eye of the beholder. Hence, other researchers with different practical and academic backgrounds than mine would most certainly identify other topics as important.