Country Stereotypes, Initial Trust, and Cooperation in Global Software Development Teams

People have to expose to collaborators from different countries in global software engineering (GSE) teams. They often rely on their perceptions of the country stereotypes to form their initial beliefs of the foreign collaborators and to make decisions on how to work with them. In this article, we employ the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) to investigate how explicit and implicit country stereotypes influence people' trust towards foreign collaborators and their decisions on cooperative behaviors. We conduct an empirical study with 92 professional software engineers with GSE experience. The results show that both SCM's explicit and implicit warmth, as well as the explicit competency, have significant impacts on the GSE team members' trust and cooperative behaviors in their initial interactions with unfamiliar foreign collaborators. Our findings indicate that Globally distributed collaboration practitioners may still need to overcome the over-reliance on country-of-origin cues when making attributions on unfamiliar foreign collaborators.