Trust

Trust, monitoring and individual anatomy: affects on the groups performance.

Group work represents a conventional theme industrial and organizational psychology (Van Mierlo, Rutte, Vermunt, Kompier and Doorewood, 2006). Individuals in a self managing teams there is always a level of risk that we need to assess to then judge how much monitoring we do and how much individual autonomy we display. Trust, monitoring and individual anatomy affects group performance.

Trust involves risk, which is willingness to be esteemed on the actions of others in a situation (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995). Many benefits are expected from trust, improved communication, more organizational citizenship behaviours, less competitive behaviour in negotiations, higher group performance, less conflict, and greater job satisfaction (Langfred, 1995). As discussed in Mcshange & Travaglione (2007) there are a number of platforms that this trust can be based on job satisfaction. Most relevant is calculus- based trust is a minimal amount of trust that is amounted through the perceptions that each member will deliver on promise due to consequences hence like better mark. However, trust is seen as weaker and less consistent, where higher levels of trust are associated with lower performance as shown in the research by Langfred (1995) where members choose not to monitor each other due to high trust.

In teams, monitoring is defined as the team member's surveillance and awareness of other team member's activities Langfred (1995). The concept of monitoring as related to the concepts of individual autonomy and trust indirectly and terms monitoring as a mediator in this relationship. Negative implications of monitoring can have on team member motivation and feelings can prevent higher level of monitoring in self managing teams. Thus, individual team members need to assess depending on their levels of trust in their team whether to support or suggest higher levels of monitoring, although need to be aware of the negative effects that each can have on the team performance.

Individual autonomy is defined as freedom, independence, and discretion in the individual task as stated by (Hackman & Oldham, 1975, 1980; Karasek, 1998) cited in Mierlo et al (2006; p282). In this article team autonomy is given the same definition based on the same attributes listed previously. Thus, a direct relationship is made between these two distinctions in autonomy. This relationship is established by the way that team autonomy gives team members the opportunity to individually further express themselves by taking on more task related responsibility which in turn equates to positive outcomes. Mierlo also makes a point by expressing the fact that this relationship does not always produce homogenous results as team members are not obligated to take on any further responsibility. Thus, this relationship between both autonomies is directly related to the various members of the team. Moreover, Langfred (2004) contributes to the notion of individual autonomy and relates it to all three concepts from the survey in the research he conducted with 300 MBA students. The research conducted by Langfred proved that high levels of individual autonomy can become a liability in self-managing teams when the level of trust is high and little monitoring takes place.

For the group assessment each student was asked to fill online survey which is attached in the appendix. Individual autonomy was the first score examined, in which individually I scored

17 out of a possible score of 21 with a mean of 14.49. Thus, to state the obvious my score is of individual autonomy is way below the mean. A simple reason for this was because I personally felt that our team had at least some input into how each one of us did our parts. To add to this, schedules of completion of work was again decided unanimously by every member. Next, the