Billions and billions and billions of years ago – when I was a doctoral student working with the eminent Prof. Morton Deutsch – the obligatory reading on trust was three of Deutsch’s articles: ‘Trust and Suspicion’ (1958); ‘The Effects of Motivational Orientation on Trust and Suspicion’ (1960); and ‘Cooperation and Trust: Some Theoretical Notes’ (1962). The articles began to introduce some very important concepts about trust: definitions of trust and its distinct iveness from other psychological constructs; the distinction between trust and trust-worthiness; and the linkages between trust and cooperative or competitive behaviours. A rereading of these articles today indicates that they set the groundwork for the richness and complexity of the construct. Yet most remarkably, with some very limited exceptions – e.g. gaming studies in which trusting choices were operationalized as the dependent variable (Kee & Knox, 1970) or trust as an enduring component of personality (e.g. Rotter, 1971) – researchers fundamentally neglected the construct for the next 30 years! Only a handful of articles (e.g. Lewis & Weigert, 1985) addressed the construct in some meaningful way.
As sharply as academic interest in the construct of trust disappeared through the seventies and eighties, there was an equally dramatic re-emergence of research on trust in the mid 1990s, largely in the field of organizational behaviour. No single source or author can be easily credited for originating this rebirth. Instead, both academic and ‘practice’ traditions seemed to lead scholars back to recognizing the centrality of trust as foundational to interpersonal and organizational relationships, but also recognizing how little was known about it. Among organizational theorists, perspectives on optimal strategies for organizational governance were changing from a heavy reliance on organizational structure and hierarchy to a focus on the importance of transactional relationships within and between individuals, groups, organizations and networks (e.g. Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick & Kerr, 2002). Formal structure and legalistic agreements were being replaced by informal social contracts and trust as the ‘glue’ that bound those relationships together (e.g. Putnam, 1995). A similar movement was occurring in the law, as attorneys and legal educators recognized the limitations of formal legal mechanisms for resolving all varieties of disputes, and began to stress the importance of alternative dispute resolution processes such as mediation to provide more long term solutions to marital and business disputes. On the academic side, a number of seminal contributions on the multifaceted nature of trust appeared within a short time period, almost all compilations of works from a variety of theoretical perspectives and levels of analysis. These included:
The last twenty years have witnessed a virtual explosion of trust research. The key role of trust has been incorporated into research in almost every social science discipline, and permeated all types of organizational research. Trust has been extensively studied in multiple research studies as an independent, moderator, mediator and dependent variable. It has been examined at multiple levels of analysis, from the intrapsychic processes of trust formation, to the inter-personal dynamics in negotiation and conflict management, to the key role of trust in understanding leadership, to the importance of trust in the formation and management of strategic alliances, to the key role of trust in knitting together the fabric of our daily social interaction. Its cross-cultural variations and embodiments have also been extensively explored. And all of this work for a phenomenon which cannot be directly seen or grasped or materially measured, but must be inferred through a variety of indirect measures of cognition, affect, motivation, intention and behaviour.
The essays in the current volume significantly advance the multiple perspectives, theories and dynamics of trust, and the contexts in which they emerge and operate. They offer a strong balance of theoretical insights, reviews of research and exploration of the dynamics of trust in contexts such as health-care, labour relations and entrepreneurship. I am confident that this volume will significantly integrate and advance research on specific important and emergent themes trust in general and on specific important and emergent themes such as trust dynamics and trust repair. It will quickly become a required resource on the bookshelf of trust researchers and practitioners alike.
Ashkenas, R., Ulrich, D., Jick, T. & Kerr, S. (2002) The Boundaryless Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organizational Structure. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Deutsch, M. (1958) Trust and suspicion. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2, 4, 265–279.
Deutsch, M. (1960) The effects of motivation on trust and suspicion. Human Relations, 13, 10, 123–139.
Deutsch, M. (1962) Cooperation and trust: Some theoretical notes. In M. R. Jones, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 275–320.
Kee, H. W. & Knox, R. E. (1970) Conceptual and methodological considerations in the study of trust and suspicion. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 14, 3, 357–366.
Kramer, R. (1994) The sinister attribution error: Paranoid cognition and collective distrust in organizations. Motivation and Emotion, 18, 2, 199–230.
Kramer, R. D. & Tyler, T. R. (1996) Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Lewicki, R., McAllister, D. & Bies, R. (1998) Trust and distrust: New relationships and realities. Academy of Management Review, 23, 3, 438–458.
Lewis, J. D. & Weigert, A. (1985) Trust as a social reality. Social Forces, 63, 4, 967–985.
Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H. & Schoorman, F. D. (1995) An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20, 709–734.
McAllister, D. (1995) Affect and cognition-based trust as foundations for interpersonal cooperation in organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 38, 1, 24–59.
Putnam, R. (1995) Tuning in, tuning out: The strange disappearance of social capital in America. Political Science & Politics, 28, 4, 664–683.
Rotter, J. (1971) Generalized expectancies for interpersonal trust. American Psychologist, 26, 5, 443–452.
Rousseau, D., Sitkin, S., Burt, R. & Camerer, C. (1998) Not so different after all: A cross-discipline view of trust. Academy of Management Review, 23, 3, 393–404.
Sitkin, S. & Roth, N. L. (1993) Explaining the limited effectiveness of legalistic remedies for trust/distrust. Organization Science, 4, 3, 367–392.