Journal of Student Research 2018

34 Journal Student Research relationship for women and was unrelated for men. One major difference between the current study and the Ennen and colleagues (2015) study was that they were able to assess participants at multiple times during a similar team-based interaction, while this study only assessed participants one time, from a variety of team work settings, after the completion of the work task. The prediction that trust would be correlated with team satisfaction was also supported, except for the null relationship with monitoring behaviors. Reflecting on the results of the study, it is important to consider the findings as many people will work with teams in their careers. As an employee that works with a team, the results indicate that there are factors in the work environment that contribute to trusting employees. As noted in previous studies, working with a team one trusts can have many benefits that reflect on the team and positively influence the organization as a whole. There are limitations to note in the study. The survey was posted to the researcher’s personal Facebook page as recruitment for participants which limits the pool to a targeted population. Additionally, participants were recruited from a large array of work settings. This study rather focused on individual participants reflecting on their own experiences in teams but did not account for the nature of these teams, such as size, longevity, and sex make-up of the teams, or perceptions of the supervisor. The major contributor to this aspect as a future direction is that different conflicts and ideas of trust between members can vary based on the type of work. Things to consider would be if each member does the same job, relatively, such as hair dressers, versus a group that all contributes a different specialty such as film makers with producers, designers and writers. Considering the current findings, a greater emphasis on sex differences should be focused on in future research. Specifically, future studies should consider placing a greater emphasis on understanding how sex differences could influence the level of trust and the perceptions of similarity, and the subsequent performance of teams both in academic and work settings. Additionally, an examination of whether the connection between trust and perceived similarity differs at all for same sex or mixed sex work groups would be beneficial to discover. It may also be useful to examine if team building activities designed to enhance trust work differently based on the sex of the team members. Limitations and Future Directions