Mutual trust and employee performance of virtual and face-to-face dyads in multilatina organisations

Abstract Firms are calling their employees back to the office because of concerns about employee productivity, collaboration, and trust. Thus, knowledge about the psychosocial aspects of virtual work environments is now more essential than ever. This study compared the relationships between mutual cognitive trust and employee performance in virtual and face-to-face leader–member dyads. Numerous studies have adopted a unidirectional approach to leader–member trust, exhibiting difficulties related to common method bias. The validity of previous research results comparing trust in face-to-face and virtual leader–member dyads can also be questioned because of other methodological drawbacks. We examined mutual trust and employee performance using different raters. We utilised the multigroup exploratory approach to simultaneously analyse face-to-face and virtual dyads formed by 180 leaders and 561 employees working at a multilatina company. Our results reveal the existence of differences between virtual and face-to-face leader–member dyads vis-à-vis mutual cognitive trust and employee performance relationship.