Date of Award
Summer 8-2020
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Education
First Advisor
Whitney McIntyre Miller
Second Advisor
Randy Busse
Third Advisor
Dawn Hunter
Fourth Advisor
Barbara Bucklin
Abstract
Business organizations increasingly understand the benefits of forming cross-functional teams, which include collaborative efforts on new initiatives and solving for current issues in the organization. Putting together a group of people from different disciplines, however, is not enough to obtain the results businesses are looking to achieve. To be effective, groups must form into a team. There are two distinct differences between a group and a team. To build a team, a group must coalesce around a unifying mission, understanding, and agreement on the purpose of the team and what they need to accomplish to be successful. The second qualifying factor in the formation of a team is members of the group must trust each other. I created an intervention based on developing communication techniques in a small group to build trust in a cross-functional workgroup. The purpose of this study was to (a) examine the potential effectiveness of an intervention I created using specifically designed communication techniques to build trust in a cross-functional workgroup, (b) determine which techniques were useful, and (c) assess where improvements could be made. What the study revealed is that a cross-functional workgroup can increase the level of trust group members have with each other and the group by enhanced communication training, including empathic listening and sharing experiences.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
De Long, R. S. (2020). Developing trust in a cross-functional workgroup: Assessing the effectiveness of a communication intervention [Doctoral dissertation, Chapman University]. Chapman University Digital Commons. https://doi.org/10.36837/chapman.000193