Organizational trust: a cultural perspective

Development and Learning in Organizations

ISSN: 1477-7282

Article publication date: 10 February 2012

4195

Citation

Saunders, M.N.K. (2012), "Organizational trust: a cultural perspective", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 26 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2012.08126baa.002

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Organizational trust: a cultural perspective

Article Type: Suggested reading From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 26, Issue 2

Mark N.K. Saunders, Denise Skinner, Graham Dietz, Nicole Gillespie and Roy LewickiCambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010

Trust is something we all might claim to know about, and particularly when we perceive or experience its “violation” or “loss”. However, fewer of us might claim to fully understand trust. Ably edited, this book brings together experts in business research, international management, business consultancy, employee relations, human resource management and business ethics among other relevant fields in order to develop a multi-perspective exploration of organizations as contexts for researching, observing and interpreting human trusting attitudes and behaviors. The premise for this collaboration between thirty plus authors and co-authors across sixteen chapters is that “the globalized nature of modern organizations presents new and intimidating challenges for effective relationship building”. Building on established scholarly research that emphasizes differences and potential boundaries between cultures, the editors undertake to develop our understanding of “the nature of cross-cultural trust-building in organizations” and thus (potentially) render the aforementioned “challenges” less “intimidating”. Along with other titles in the impressive CUP Companions to Management series, this book targets a readership of “academics, graduate students and reflective business practitioners”. My current work involves supporting “reflective practitioners” in a multi-national enterprise, so this is the perspective I have chosen to emphasize in this review.

It should be noted at the outset that the “organizational trust” of the title invokes contexts for trusting rather than just another item in the burgeoning typology of specialist trust research. The limits to current research understandings of the nature of trust within and across different forms and types of organizations are comprehensively outlined in chapter one by Dietz, Gillespie and Chao. They emphasize how cross-cultural trust building for business is both historically rooted and remains a universally vital and relevant social, economic and, in the spirit of this book, cultural phenomenon. In this chapter a model of “cultural spheres” (elsewhere referred to as a “cultural mosaic”) is introduced (p. 7). It highlights a cluster of possible expressions of individual business identity through the example of a Muslim business woman socialized by family, education and work experience into a variety of eastern and western social, business and professional work cultures. This focus on a mix of individual and collective cultural identities stakes an early challenge to the more sweeping group-oriented attributions of national cultural identities that characterize the “cultural perspectives” offered by many other books on international business and management. This is encouraging and, as a stand-alone, this first chapter would secure a memorable enough impact. Like the Silk Road metaphor, the spheres or “mosaic” of individual business cultural identities – as shared with empirical trust researchers – acts as leitmotif through subsequent chapters. Unfortunately, the allowable length of this review is too short to do full justice to the fifteen chapters that follow. Consequently, I must limit myself to some highlights.

The theme of part 1 (chapters 1 to 4) outlines “the conceptual challenge of researching trust across different cultural spheres”. The focus is on diverse meanings attributed to trust from an international (primarily English-language) research perspective. The intention here is to identify both universal and culture-specific interpretations of trust. Various contexts for interpreting trust are explored: national cultural, societal-cultural, professional. In chapter three, for example, Bachmann states firmly that “trust is an inherently context-bound concept” (p. 87) – that is, “bound” by reference to diverse and discrete professional, judicial, and industrial contexts. Bachmann explores trust in relation to power – an approach that appeals to business practitioners whose primary interest in trust might be its potential as a “coordinating mechanism” for short-term relationships with trust as a possible longer-term value added of these. People can cooperate without trust; they perform more effectively, perhaps, where trust obtains. At this point, the intervention by Ehnert and Wright (chapter 4) is timely. We should move away from interpreting trust as a commodity to be “had”, “lost”, or (like a mechanism) “levered”. Rather, we might be better served understanding trust as a process, a purposively structured conversation as suggested in the phrase “a trusting relationship”. To cite directly:

Actors are never in any particular state of trust, but are in a ceaseless and uneven flow of trusting. As contexts unfold the need for trusting activity fluctuates (p. 110).

The chapters of part 2 apply the “cultural spheres” metaphor to “inter-organizational studies”. To illustrate, Kramer (chapter 7) develops a social-psychological perspective in order to illustrate how attempts to establish trust – and, perhaps, distrust – might encounter “barriers” in contexts for cross-cultural negotiations. Trust and distrust are not opposites: they are options. Further chapters explore other contexts for such negotiations. However, the trend here becomes again to emphasize national cultural differences: nationality as a “gap” that separates partners intent on negotiating a business relationship. Examples include negotiations between Germans and Ukrainians in contexts defined by institutional uncertainty (Möllering and Stache, chapter 8), while Lyon and Porter (chapter 10) compare relationships between Nigerian and Ghanaian food traders, correlating networks of trust to market networks and taking into account the “personal social” and economic fluctuations that each might undergo both separately and in combination.

The chapters in Part Three highlight intra-organizational contexts for cross-cultural trust building. Here the focus for discussion is on cross-national ventures including partnerships between NGOs in contexts for social and economic development. To illustrate, in chapter 11 Smith and Schwegler draw on empirical data to present a table (p. 290) listing “NGO partnership criteria” that might be used a template for predicting how such inter- and (according to plan) intra-organizational partnerships might fare in times of “crisis”. The richness of research data presented across these chapters is impressive. For example, Arzu Wasti and Tan (chapter 12) explore universals and culture-specific antecedents to how management professionals might perceive each other as more or less trustworthy, comparing quantitative and qualitative data from practitioners in Chinese and Turkish business cultures. In a similar exercise Hope-Hailey, Farndale and Kelliher (chapter 13) explore trust in contexts for “significant corporate change” and thus connect with an intra-organizational “crisis” common to many organizations regardless of business sector. Their data derive from 5,026 quantified questionnaire responses correlated with 25 interviews designed to provide more qualitative data. The detail of their account provides expert guidance to other empirical trust researchers and highlights some of the threats to validity and reliability that this research entails. To illustrate, questionnaire items such as “I feel confident that senior management will always try to treat me fairly” (p. 354) is fraught with dangers of multiple interpretation when respondents attach their own values to notions of “fair” and “always”, and particularly where English is not their first language. Apropos, in chapter 14 Henderson suggests that focusing on a shared and operationalized use of English as a lingua franca can act as a “barrier” to the development of trust among members of cross-cultural or international management teams. The warning to practitioners here is that what might be gained thus in terms of communication efficiency might be lost in terms of work effectiveness, assuming a team relationship based on trust is a performance objective. For team, read family business or SME, for in chapter 15 Mari explores “the dynamics of trust across cultures in family firms”. Here the focus is on “interacting subcultures” – a focus that, in truth, is relevant to cross-cultural research in any national organization and in any international team. It is refreshing to see such emphasis given to smaller-sized organizations, complicated in this case by ownership issues generated by sub-cultural (e.g. generation-specific) communication of personal, social and business interests over time; refreshing because OECD statistics confirm that the vast majority of employees worldwide seek to understand and work with trust in organizations with fewer than 300 employees.

The concluding chapter (16) represents a collective reflection among the four co-editors of the collection. They emphasize “implications for practice” and “directions for future research”. They confirm that “cultural differences matter!” and re-connect with discussions in previous chapters about the “nature and relative importance of factors that support the development and maintenance of trust” (p. 418). The highlighting here of “relative importance” exemplifies the doubt that still remains about the nature of trust and about culture(s) as a context for trusting. In response, a reflective business practitioner might say “yes, OK, culture is important, but what about the influence of economic, legal and technological factors?” A strategically minded practitioner might ask about the global impact of demographic and ecological factors on notions of trust and relationship sustainability – themes barely developed here.

Overall, this book offers a richly diverse discussion around trust and on diverse types and forms of organizations as contexts for eliciting and understanding trust. Thanks to the efforts of the editors and their many contributors, the book is laudably ambitious: the field of trust research remains complex and, in many aspects, enigmatic. One abiding impression left from reading this book is the investment we might make into attempts to visualize trust rather than “merely” write about it, e.g. the mosaic metaphor invoked initially in chapter one. For those researchers and practitioners willing to risk such an investment, this book offers a relevant and reliable starting point.

Reviewed by Keith Jackson, SOAS – University of London, London, UK, and Institute for Applied Trust Research, Stuttgart, Germany.

This review was originally published in Personnel Review, Vol. 40, No. 4, 2011.

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