Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches

Citation

Grover, S.L. (2005), "Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches", Personnel Review, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 507-509. https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480510600083

Trust has become a lens focussing social scientists’ attention on a variety of issues in the past decade due in part to its as foundation for all relationships. The 14 chapters of Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches represent some of the most promising work using the trust lens on a dramatic range of issues. The questions addressed in this volume are as diverse as:

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  Why do gay men trust their partners in unprotected sex?

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  Why was Lyndon Johnson so paranoid when he held one of the most powerful positions in the world?

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  How do business leaders establish images of trustworthiness?

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  How does betrayal affect co‐worker trust and how is it restored?

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  Why do patients trust some physicians and not others?

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  How can you promote trust among competing firms?

The book is the result of a boutique conference funded by the Russell Sage foundation, a private social research foundation that operates a program to investigate the role of trust in contemporary society. Far from the usual rehash of contributors’ pet theories found in some edited volumes, this volume presents novel ideas, approaches, and methods to bear on the questions that surround trust. Moreover, at least a third of the chapters present original data, including qualitative studies of social work supervisors, physician‐client relationships, network facilitators in localised industry, and the tapes from Lyndon Johnson's presidential years. The other chapters are mixtures literature review and new theory.

The volume represents the academic rope of trust: Threads from various disciplines intertwine with those of different methods and levels of analysis. Included are organizational behaviour‐flavoured reviews of trust‐in‐leaders, reactions to betrayal, and social conflict bargaining research. These approaches are augmented with micro‐economic, political, and communication theories. Edited volumes that attempt to integrate divergent perspectives run the risk of becoming nothing more than physical holdings of unrelated chapters. In stark contrast, Trust and Distrust in Organizations is all the richer for its successful integration of perspectives. Highly specialised researchers from one field will appreciate the jewel of trust in new ways by looking at its other facets.

The construction of trust primarily used in this volume is to make oneself vulnerable to another, and that vulnerability is explored in the roles of sexual partner, business competitor, physician's patient, and subordinate. In the course of discussing trust from various perspectives and levels of analysis some important lessons and distinctions develop. John Darley makes the distinction between calculative and noncalculative trust. Calculative trust is based on an idea that there is a rational basis for engaging in the vulnerability and that negative outcomes can be mitigated with claims. Non‐calculative trust shares elements of affective trust (McAllister, 1995), which might be reserved for very close relationships such as with family members. Related to these notions of different types of trust, Keith Murnighan and colleagues’ chapter demonstrates with data from several studies that contracts create an explicit notion of this calculative trust. People were less likely in several studies to trust a bargaining partner in subsequent interactions when previous interactions were based on contracts, even non‐binding ones, than if they were based on an unexpressed trust.

Another common dimension of trust drawn from the readings is the notion of trustworthiness as a response to how one presents oneself. Physicians engendered greater trust in their patients if they gave reasons for treatment, included the patient in decisions, and made themselves available after the visit by phone or email. In addition, they were more trusted when they projected images of empathy and caring, which was observed in the data by doctors remembering details about clients, maintaining eye contact, and not appearing rushed. Kimberly Elsbach's chapter on trustworthy images digested from the literature that managers and others will be perceived as more trustworthy if they use appropriate, acceptable language for the audience, dress the part they are playing, and use the formal titles that suggest they know what they are talking about. She uses social identity theory to explain how these behaviours combine to create images of being a member of the perceiver's in‐group or representing oneself as representative of the focus group.

Kurt Dirks and Daniel Skarlicki's chapter on trust in leaders makes the distinction between relation‐ and character‐based trust. Relationship trust is based on a leader's interaction with someone. Hence, managers who keep promises and follow through on what they say they will do will have greater relationship‐based trust. Character based trust is the more amorphous in that it represents the subordinate's response to the any of the leaders’ actions or behaviours. Moreover, trusting immediate supervisors versus senior management has different outcomes. Trust in supervisor leads to a host of positive subordinate behaviours represented as organizational citizenship behaviours, whereas trust in senior management generates organizational commitment.

The middle section of this volume assesses trust and distrust in teams and networks. It includes analyses of trust in online computer interactions, local industry organizations, and trust within groups. Helen Nissenbaum's chapter on online interactions pits trust against security. She convincingly argues the case that computer users desire security mechanisms to ensure their safety with online interactions. She arrives at the conclusion, however, that such security is a facade and that it is ultimately impossible to secure anonymous online interactions.

Amy Edmondson explores the relation of the constructs of psychological safety and trust at the team level. Psychological safety expresses the degree to which one is willing to become vulnerable to others due to specific behaviour while working in groups. For example, an individual mistake made on some teams will lead to negative consequences for the individual, whereas other teams will accept the burden of mistakes. Psychological safety as Edmondson describes it is closely related to trust. The subtle differences are that safety focuses the benefit of doubt given to the self as opposed to others, focuses on a specific behaviour at a single point in time, and occurs within a group or team. She offers propositions about what encourages psychological safety within teams, and these include providing the team with a practice ground to make mistakes, creating a supportive climate in which team members feel entitled to object to norms, and having leaders who know all of this.

In a pleasant contrast to the rest of the volume, Bill McEvily and Akbar Zaheer explore how trust is created among competing firms. They studied competing furniture manufacturers in what strategy researchers call “clusters”. The study focuses on “network facilitators”, and using grounded theory they examined a regional furniture manufacturing council. The council developed common standards adopted by competing manufacturers that made servicing the companies easier and made for smoother client interactions. Hence McEvily and Zaheer refer to the council as “architects of trust”, and discover that competitors who previously had little reason to place themselves vulnerable to one another realised that they had shared interests that could be served through some coordination.

Trust and Distrust in Organisations is undoubtedly required reading for researchers who study management issues related to trust. The editors have assembled a fine crew of varied scholars who deliver extremely well written, thoughtful essays on aspects of trust. Management researchers and advanced students who study trust will find most of the chapters useful for their endeavours. Individual chapters will serve as integrative literature sources for anyone engaged in research related to trust.