Levels of Organizational Trust in Individualist Versus Collectivist Societies: A Seven-Nation Study

Abstract

Competitiveness in global industries increasingly requires the ability to develop trusting relationships. This requires organizations, and the individuals they are comprised of, to be both trustworthy and trusting. An important question is whether societal culture influences the tendency of individuals and organizations to trust. Based largely on Yamagishi's (1994, 1998a, b) theories explaining trust, commitment, and in-group bias in collectivist cultures, this study examines potential differences in levels of trust between individualist and collectivist cultures. Survey data was collected from 1,282 mid-level managers from large banks in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, and the United States. We first study differences in how individuals from individualist and collectivist societies trust ingroups versus out-groups. This provides an important foundation for hypotheses regarding differences in individual propensities to trust and two measures of organizational trust: internal trust (trust within the organization) and external trust (an organization's trust for suppliers, customers, etc.). Findings show higher levels of propensity to trust and organizational external trust in the United States than in Asia.

Establishing and Maintaining Organizational Trust in the 21st Century

“…The success or failure of any organization is directly related to the level of trust present within it (Huff and Kelley, 2003). In recent years many organizations have experienced decreases in job satisfaction and employee performance and related increases in employee attrition that can be traced back directly to the level of trust (Perry and Mankin, 2007).…”

Managing the Impact of Differences in National Culture on Social Capital in Multinational IT Project Teams – A German Perspective

“…DeLone et al (2005) quote that cultural differences based on divergent values affect team cognition encompassing shared beliefs, shared knowledge, and the development of trust in global IS development projects. Particularly, trust building is highly influenced by differences in national culture as this process strongly depends upon the societal norms and values that guide people's behavior and beliefs (Doney et al, 1998;Huff and Kelley, 2003). Earley and Mosakowski (2000) confirm that team identity is affected by the nationality of the team members, and Paul and Ray (2009) report a negative relationship between cultural differences and team social integration in this context.…”

Agent-Based and Population-Based Modeling of Trust Dynamics

“…To apply the basic trust model to obtain a population-based model of trust, its ingredients have to be considered for the population P as a whole, for example, the (direct and indirect) experience given by the trustee to a population P, and the characteristics  P of the population [9,12] this is done as follows: (11) Here T P (t) is the trust of population P on a given trustee at time point t, and the population-level flexibility characteristic is taken as an aggregate value for the individual flexibility characteristics for all agents A in P (e.g., the average of the for AP). This can be interpreted as if the population as a whole is represented as one agent who receives experiences from the trustee and updates its trust on the trustee using the basic model.…”

“…This can be interpreted as if the population as a whole is represented as one agent who receives experiences from the trustee and updates its trust on the trustee using the basic model. The experience at population level E P (t) at time point t for the population P is defined as the combination of the direct and the indirect experience at population level as follows: (12) In equation (12), and are the indirect and direct experience at the population level. Moreover, α P is the population-level social influence characteristic.…”

“…Besides the experience given by the trustee to a population P, the dynamics of population level trust are influenced by the characteristics of the population [12]. Here P is defined as a population of N agents receiving same experiences from a trustee and/or communicating with each other.…”