Trust matters. Over the last 20 years there has been a cumulative increase in trust as a topic of interest not only to scholars, but also for the public. Turning on a TV news programme or opening a newspaper reveals the salience of trust, be it the news concerning its violation or the aftermath. Trust is an area that is of interest far beyond academia, extending to a broad array of groups from corporations and practitioners, to governments and policy makers, and to media and public. Periods of turbulence and scandal seem to be endemic since the start of the twenty-first century, and have been accompanied by profound questions about trust and the growing issue of distrust, and so whether and how we can restore or repair trust is a germane matter. Indeed, trust and its decline is very much a zeitgeist.
Trust has important impact across levels and across sectors. It emerges as a matter of importance in sectors critical for our economies, with the public’s trust jeopardized by the actions of institutions, leaders, organizational members and officials. Recent scandals in sectors such as government, religion, banking, energy, food and manufacturing show how the actions of a single organization or even a single individual may have a huge impact across a sector, and are able to raise deep challenges for government and regulators faced with trying to prevent their repetition. This demonstrates trust is of great relevance on three levels: the individual level, the organizational level and the wider system-level.
Trust on the individual level can be placed in jeopardy due to the emergence of particular labour practices such as zero-hours contracts or the rise of self-employment, or from inappropriate use of company pension provisions, all of which shift risk from the firm to the employee. At an organizational level, trust breaches, such as that identified in the emissions scandal of Volkswagen, can taint an entire brand, with consequences for both their products and employees. Viewed at the system level, such scandals can challenge practices for an entire sector. Further, the public and third sectors are not immune from trust issues, with widespread failures of these sectors to detect and handle effectively trust breaches. This is evident in the UK’s BBC problems, including inappropriate fixing of competition winners and sexual abuse by paedophilic pre senters, or in a number of police forces in countries including India, USA and UK with differences in their treatment of citizens on ethnicity and gender lines.
Trust is even more visible and impactful nowadays. While, sadly, the examples of trust challenges are not new, it is the speed with which social media can draw attention to events that can more rapidly ignite large-scale social unrest and demonstrations. The reputation loss to such organizations can have damaging long-term consequences, including raising concerns about the competence and integrity of their staff, while also fostering higher levels of ongoing scrutiny and distrust by politicians and the public. Concerns about trust and distrust can become a more prominent feature for political leaders and parties during elections, but also during periods of crisis, such as the UK’s Brexit, or in the handling of various countries’ financial crises. The trustworthiness of political actors, especially their integrity, are legitimate questions for those seeking or holding public office. The media play an important role in drawing and fanning public concerns, but also in their potential to incite further trust violations.
The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive reference that offers students, researchers and practitioners an introduction to current scholarship in the expanding discipline of trust. We want to make convenient to our readers access either to a new area – trust – or insight into a previously unfamiliar specialized area of trust research for more knowledgeable readers. Thus, we aim our collection at readers in behavioural economics, cultural anthropology, organizational behaviour, management studies, political science, psychology and sociology. It is designed to create the opportunity to reflect and consider trust in all its guises. To achieve this, we have assembled contributions from key and emergent authors that highlight the current state of their part of this field. Our contributors include established and up-and-coming contributors from research and practice, enabling us to develop a single repository on the current state of knowledge, the existing debates and emergent concerns, which in turn can better inform and extend the field of trust.
Authors were asked to do two things – to provide a review of their domain for those new to the area, to identify the important new and emerging challenges and also the omissions to our current theoretical and conceptual understandings of that aspect of trust. By doing this, they have served the community well by reflecting on the distinct earlier works Lewicki mentioned in his Preface. They show that, while much has been done in the domain of trust, there is both more to develop and also a need to return to important neglected or partially answered questions. This collection is specifically designed to open debate between more OB-and micro-based fields of trust research typical of behavioural economics and psychology and those approaching trust from more meso- and macro-based perspectives such as sociological, organization theory, strategic, anthropological, political science and culture researcher perspectives. Through the gathering of these diverse perspectives, fresh insight into old issues might be generated, as well as more novel knowledge devised.
As editors, we offer some structure to the field by organizing the contributions into six key sections. Within the sections and across the book, the editors and authors have attempted to highlight dialogues and connections to other chapters. Key conferences have created useful places for authors themselves to discuss and identify synergies, most notably the European Group of Organization Studies’ (EGOS) standing working group on organizational trust, events of the First International Network Trust Research (FINT) and the Academy of Management (AOM). We asked authors to provide a balanced overview of current knowledge in their key topic, to identify pertinent issues and debates and to offer a fresh and critical perspective on where that area needs to be developed. Thus each chapter is simultaneously past, current and future oriented.
The book is organized in six thematic parts, comprising 31 chapters in total. The first three are foundations and conceived as essentially intradisciplinary in character, designed to explore the development of key theories and perspectives which have been used to examine trust. The last three parts deal with the application of trust and current topics.
Part I: The first section, entitled ‘Foundations of trust’, includes four chapters focusing on key concerns, or underpinnings for trust scholarship. We begin with the sometimes neglected topic of affect-based trust. Here, Daan van Knippenberg draws attention to the social and emotional processes, arguing for the importance of affect, emotion and mood in trust. He identifies the role of emotional contagion. M. Audrey Korsgaard reviews research on the interpersonal concept of reciprocal trust, a complex, bidirectional phenomenon which involves a self-reinforcing dynamic process. Kirsimarja Blomqvist and Karen S. Cook turn our attention towards swift trust, identified by Meyerson, Weick and Kramer; they examine specifically swift trust and the role of technology and virtual interactions. The distinction between trust and distrust is discussed by Sim B. Sitkin and Katinka M. Bijlsma-Frankema in the last chapter of this section.
Part II: The next section ‘Levels of analysis’ includes four chapters specifically considering the distinct levels of analysis used in the study of trust, from micro to more multi-foci approaches. Donald L. Ferrin and Serena C. Lyu provide an exploration of the field pertaining to an interpersonal level of analysis. They review 20 years of work, identifying the significant ante cedents, functions and consequences of interpersonal trust within organizations. Ann-Marie I. Nienaber, Maximilian Holtgrave and Philipp D. Romeike explore the team level of analysis and separate further two important distinctions – trust within and trust between teams. They also consider the determinants and outcomes of trust at each of these team levels, noting the similarities and differences between intra- and inter-team trust. They raise important considerations for the development of theory and measurements in this area. Anna Brattström and Reinhard Bachmann then consider inter-organizational trust from four theoretical perspectives, distinguishing between attention in each perspective on the various misalignments in each of incentives (cooperation concerns) and activities (coordination concerns). Finally, C. Ashley Fulmer discusses the use of more complex cross- and multi-level analysis for trust. She reflects on the value of this approach highlighting where this perspective has real value to the field. She advocates further development of both theory and methods to extend this more sophisticated approach to the study of trust.
Part III: The third section, ‘Theories of trust’, looks at some of the main theoretical perspectives used to study trust, contrasting the application of psychological, sociological and economics-based theories. The section begins with Michael Baer and Jason A. Colquitt’s exploration of the psychological antecedents of trust, including dispositions to trust and trustworthiness, which dominate approaches to the field, and two neglected antecedents (i.e. the roles of affect and heuristics). E. Allan Lind examines the intersection of fairness and trust to review some of the main studies from organizational justice research. He provides insight into the theory and methods used to study trust and trusting behaviour. Using empirical evidence, he outlines situations where impressions of fair treatment may be a substitute, or replacement, for judgments of trust. Our attention then shifts to the study of trust through the lens of social exchange theory. Jacqueline A-M. Coyle-Shapiro and Marjo-Riitta Diehl look at trust and its role in social exchange relationships within the context of the employee–organization relationship (EOR). They revisit the origins of this concept before bringing their review up to date with the current work that is based on such perspectives. Reinhard Bachmann takes a contrasting sociological perspective in reviewing an institutional theory perspective on trust, highlighting scenarios in which institutions might be more critical for trust, and considers the importance of regulation for trust. Laura Poppo and Zheng Cheng build on the importance of regulation by reviewing research on trust and contracts using perspectives of transaction cost economics and social embeddedness. They consider the specific role of contracts and trust and whether they are complements or substitutes in business-to-business exchanges. In the final chapter of this section, we return to a more socio-psycho logical perspective with Edward C. Tomlinson’s review of attribution analysis. He explores the role of attributions in the development, decline and repair of trust and argues that attribution deserves more attention in future trust studies because of its centrality to trust dynamics.
Part IV: The topic of ‘Trust repair’ has been gaining a lot of attention and we have therefore created a section concerned specifically with trust breach and repair. Peter H. Kim reviews the topic of interpersonal trust repair, and then Nicole Gillespie and Sabina Siebert reflect on organizational repair. We conclude this section with a chapter that takes a distinct view on trust repair by focusing on the issue of forgiveness. Robert J. Bies, Laurie J. Barclay, Maria F. Saldanha, Adam A. Kay and Thomas M. Tripp consider trust and distrust and their role in forgiveness. They also offer alternatives for situations where the nature of the breach makes forgiveness impossible.
Part V‘Applications’: One of the key questions we have wanted to explore in this book is whether trust is different in distinct contexts. In the penultimate section, we examine the issue of trust in eight different applied settings to consider more explicitly the salience of trust and what matters in various contexts. These include health (Samantha Peters and Douglas Bilton), finance (Robert F. Hurley), professionals (Frédérique Six), employee relations (Kim Mather), the internet (Lisa Van der Werff, Colette Real and Theodore G. Lynn), entrepreneurship (Trenton A. Williams and Dean A. Shepherd), safety-critical contexts (Brian C. Gunia, Sharon H. Kim and Kath leen Sutcliffe), and food (Lovisa Näslund and Fergus Lyon). In each, the significance of trust for and to different stakeholders can vary, but the salience of trust and the consequences of its breach makes it an important topic for each applied area – both because the inclusion of trust adds substantially to the depth of understanding of researchers on each application and also because these varied applications provide additional forums and insights upon which future trust researchers can build. More specifically, subtle distinctions emerge in reading across these contributions about the distinctions between trust and distrust, and the roles of distinct actors. The chapters illuminate issues of power, regulation and control and clearly identify not only the key differences for each distinct area, but also fruitful avenues for further research. Our introduction to this section includes more details on the key issues each raises, as well as high lighting links to other chapters where synergies arise.
Part VI: In the final section of the book, we consider ‘Future directions’ by identifying some of the important emergent topics and concerns for the field. These chapters highlight topics that are fresh and those where there are important resurgences of interest. Deanne N. Den Hartog explores the central topic of trust in leadership and trust fostered by leadership. Then, Nadine Raaphorst and Steven Van de Walle examine trust in and by the public sector. They consider the trust issue in and for citizens. Rosalind H. Searle outlines the importance of trust for and in Human Resource Management, a currently underdeveloped area with great potential for future work. This has strong links to the subsequent chapter of Chris P. Long and Antoinette Weibel; which discusses the differ ences and relationship between trust and control. Finally, Shay S. Tzafrir, Guy Enosh and Laliv Egozi bring us full circle by looking more closely at the question of affect, specifically trust and anger.
We complete our book with some concluding thoughts to offer some synthesis and signal potential future topics and concerns, but also to identify emergent approaches that might profitably be adopted in this field. A postscript from Michele Williams considers developments in the curriculum for trust and discusses how it might be used in teaching.