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Trust
All organizations comprise people who work together to accomplish objectives. Since the mid-1990s, trust has become recognized as a fundamental building block of such working relationships both within organizations and between people, groups, and organizations themselves. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have considered the concept of trust as it relates to their respective fields. The history of trust within management research dates back arguably to the work of Morton Deutsch in the 1950s. This work was highly insightful and began to provide a foundation for thinking about the topic. Subsequent work in management for many years was sporadic, with little in mainstream journals. By the 1980s, trust was frequently mentioned as being important to other issues, but then, attention would be turned to issues that were more tangible and easier to define. In 1995, Roger C. Mayer, James H. Davis, and F. David Schoorman defined trust as “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.” (p. 712). They went on to clarify that the definition applied to a relationship with a definable other party. The other party must be perceived to behave in ways that demonstrate conscious choices. Trust is not dichotomous, in that one either trusts or does not trust another party, but is a continuum from not being willing to be vulnerable to the focal party to being highly willing to be vulnerable to that party. This entry will next consider the antecedents of trust, its relationship with risk and risk taking, how it is different from cooperation, its multilevel nature as defined here, the evolution of the field’s view of trust, and finally applications of this approach to trust for practicing managers.
Fundamentals
There are several major factors that cause a party to trust another. They can be broadly categorized into three areas: factors about the trusting party (trustor), factors about the to-be-trusted party (trustee), and factors about the context or situation in which the relationship takes place. Julian B. Rotter is recognized as being among the first to carefully consider the general willingness to trust others as being an important issue. He published a 25-item scale of interpersonal trust in the late 1960s, which for years dominated how the field thought about trust. More recently, this has come to be commonly referred to in the management literature as the propensity to trust.
Three factors about the trustee have been found to determine a great deal of variance of how much a trustor will trust a given trustee or antecedents of trust: (a) ability, (b) benevolence, and (c) integrity. These collectively determine the perception of the trustee’s trustworthiness.
Ability is the capacity of the trustee to do things important to the trustor. It is task specific and situation specific, meaning that a given party could be perceived to have strong ability in one domain but in a somewhat different domain have somewhat weaker skills. The second factor that makes one perceived as trustworthy is benevolence, which is the perception that the trustee wants to do positive things for the trustor. It is more individualistic than a notion of being “benevolent toward all”; it is the perception that the trustee has the trustor’s interests at heart because of the relationship. The third factor that makes a trustee seem trustworthy is integrity. Integrity is the perception that the trustee follows a set of values the trustor finds acceptable. This does not mean that the trustee has the same set of values, as the value sets people have can vary in many dimensions. Rather, it means that the important values that matter to the issue at hand are sufficiently matched. In addition, a perception that the trustee has integrity requires the trustee to adhere to the professed values. It is not enough that the trustee merely claims to have a set of values, as a discrepancy between the party’s professed values and observed actions would decrease the perception that the trustee has integrity.
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- Nature of Management
- Managing People, Personality, and Perception
- Affect Theory
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