Publish at October 08 2013 Updated February 26 2025
The Usabilis site reprints the text of a lecture given by Jean-Yves Prax in 2001 and originally titled: The role of trust in collective performance. The author discusses the notion of trust and what it means for knowledge sharing and learning communities. We will see that despite its age, this text has lost absolutely nothing of its relevance and is still an excellent guide for building trust in learning communities.
Trust is a polysemous notion that refers to at least four situations. It can be a reasoned or emotional choice, arise from a critical process (certification) or be based on reciprocity. In the professional environment, it is based more on rational than on affective or moral factors. Thus in a learning community, a member is trusted more for his or her competence than anything else.
This said, the existence of a learning community is based on the shared trust between its members that is organized around four key factors: reciprocity in sharing, recognition of individual merits, feedback from the community as a driver of learning, and shared unity of language and values.
Experience has shown that trust is built incrementally and its maintenance follows a gradual process. It is first instantaneous and then calculated. Then, it is predictive when the interacting actors know each other well enough to predict each other's behavior. After the prediction stage, it is based on the results obtained individually or collectively within the community, for example. In an ultimate phase, trust becomes intensive when all actors have a shared view of mutual goals, purposes, and values.
Trust plays a crucial role in virtual communities. This is the least we can say for actors who do not know each other a priori and cannot see each other at work. Of course, trust cannot fail to influence the effectiveness of these communities. Indeed, this is what Prax argues, establishing a clear link between the degree of trust and the level of performance.
The higher the trust, the higher the performance. And conversely, a weakening of confidence leads to poor performance. A table in the text summarizes the do's and don'ts of virtual communities where the risk of crises is permanent.
Finally, the author relies on to a North American study to restore the role of individual competence in collective performance. Clearly, the effectiveness of a learning community relies more on the clarity of its functioning, the system of evaluation and recognition, and the processes of information flow, than on individual contributions. It is the effectiveness of the system that inspires confidence above all and allows for the accumulation of individual aports.
See:
Prax Jean-Yves (2001). The role of trust in collective performance. Lecture given for the opening of the KMForum, October. 10 p. (pdf)
Framablog - "On trust within a community" Accessed October 8, 2013.
https://framablog.org/2010/08/24/confiance/
Illustration: america365, Shutterstock.com
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