A time to trust? The buffering effect of trust and its temporal variations in the context of high‐reliability teams

Abstract

This study aims to further clarify the functionality of job resources in the context of highreliability teams. Combining extant stress models with theoretical considerations from team research, we address temporal variations in the buffering effect of trust in teammates. We hypothesize that trust buffers the negative effect of objective physical activity on perceived strain and that this buffering effect is more pronounced during later performance episodes (i.e., when employees complete a series of temporally distinguishable tasks). We tested the hypotheses with a sample of professional firefighters who completed a sequence of 3 performance episodes in a high-fidelity simulation environment. Each participant was equipped with a smartphone capturing individual motion activity, which we used as an indicator of physical activity. In line with our hypotheses, multilevel modeling revealed a buffering effect of trust on the relationship between physical activity and perceived strain. Importantly, this buffering effect was more pronounced in the second performance episode as compared with the first performance episode. Our findings add a temporal perspective to the understanding of the effectiveness of job resources. In addition, the current study illustrates the usefulness of smartphones for obtaining behavioral data in a naturalistic setting. Tübingen. He is a coeditor of an international social psychological textbook (together with M. Hewstone and W. Stroebe, sixth English edition, translation into eight additional languages). Sebastian Feese is a senior researcher at the Wearable Computing Lab of ETH Zürich. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zürich in 2014. In his doctoral thesis, he investigated methods to automatically observe social interaction and coordination in teams using wearable sensors. His research interests are team and crowd behavior sensing, social signal processing, and machine learning. In 2015, he cofounded antavi GmbH. Gerhard Tröster is a Professor and Chair of the Electronics Laboratory at the ETH Zurich. He obtained his doctorate from the Technical University of Darmstadt about the design of analog integrated circuits. At ETH Zurich, his fields of research include wearable computing, flexible electronics, human-computer interaction, and detection of the physical, mental, and social contexts of the user aiming at applications in health care and music. How to cite this article: Burtscher MJ, Meyer B, Jonas K, Feese S, Tröster G. A time to trust? The buffering effect of trust and its temporal variations in the context of high-reliability teams. J Organ Behav.

Managing Pandemics—Demands, Resources, and Effective Behaviors Within Crisis Management Teams

“…Our results stress the importance of support structures within the CMTs, a collegial spirit, and mutual trust within CMTs. These results are well in line with more general findings in teams (e.g., Breuer et al, 2016; Hüffmeier & Hertel, 2011) and high reliability contexts (e.g., Brooks et al, 2018): For instance, trust has been recognized as an important resource for operational firefighter teams (Burtscher, Meyer, Jonas, Feese, & Tröster, 2018). The findings of our study suggest that trust is also central in CMTs, which operate rather strategically, have a long‐term perspective, and lead at distance from a command center.…”

Employee Physical Activity: A Multidisciplinary Integrative Review

“…Tsai, Lai, Shih, Lin, & Liou, 2014), which may partially explain associations linking physical activity to reduced health complaints (Hecht & Boies, 2009; see Ganster & Rosen, 2013). Higher levels of physical activity also relate to lower employee stress perceptions (Burtscher, Meyer, Jonas, Feese, & Tröster, 2018; Sliter & Sliter, 2014). However, similar to research on predictors of physical activity, no theoretical framework has been consistently applied when examining criteria associated with employee physical activity.…”

The time has come to study dynamics at work

“…This means that time could be treated as a moderator, creating boundary conditions for relationships or defining qualitatively different processes depending on time (e.g., career phases). Examples in this special issue include the articles by Rousseau et al () and Burtscher, Meyer, Jonas, Feese, and Tröster (). The former delineates four distinct phases in psychological contracts over time: creation, maintenance, renegotiation, and repair (Rousseau et al, ).…”

“…Hence, time serves as a contextual backdrop against which psychological contract processes are described. The latter paper distinguishes between performance episodes, showing that trust buffers the effects of physical activity on strain and that this buffering effect subsides in later performance episodes (Burtscher et al, ).…”

“…Luckily, the increased availability of ambulatory assessment techniques, such as experience sampling and diary studies, facilitates the collection of high‐density temporal data (Fisher & To, ; Hofmans, De Clerq, Kuppens, Verbeke, & Widiger, ; Ohly, Sonnentag, Niessen, & Zapf, ). In addition, many smartphones and smartwatches now contain sensors that can be used to capture information on movement, location, heartrate, and other indicators that could be used to infer psychological processes (e.g., activity or stress levels; Burtscher et al, ). Alternatively, researchers can record interactions at the workplace (Lehmann‐Willenbrock & Chiu, ).…”