Abstract

Since 1990's, as information technology and internet have been rapidly developed and broadly used, new forms of organizations have appeared. In many organizations, temporary project teams and joint ventures are often formed to adapt to a new environment. Organizational members are dependent on each other, working and communicating through various on-line communication channels in different places. From these views, this study was performed to examine the relationships among organizational environment, trust, and cooperations by surveying 126 ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning) consultants. The stability of the intranet in the organizational have positive effects, with task-trust on cooperation behaviors mediating, The task information in the organization have positive effects, with relationship-trust on cooperation behaviors mediating. The accessibility of intranet in organization has positive effects on trust factors, but not on cooperation behaviors. The task interdependence have positive effects on cooperation behavior, which is, however, not mediated by trust. Trust is composed of 2 factors - one is trust in task, the other is trust in relationship. Task trust has a more positive effect on cooperation behavior than relationship trust. This study has some contributions to theories and practices in this area studied because it attempted to test a interrelationship model among organizational environment, trust, and cooperation empirically in the virtualized organizations. Some of the limits in this study are that the numbers of the items in the scales and respondents were small, which might not make the results of the study generalizable. Further study will be necessary to establish validities of the measures of organizational environment, trust and cooperation, and to test the model in larger samples, and to examine the effects of time.