Looking ‘Beyond the Factory Gates’: Towards more Pluralist and Radical Approaches to Intraorganizational Trust Research

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to suggest new avenues for trust research by critiquing the extant literature on this topic. We analyse the most influential research on intraorganizational trust from the perspective of a classic industrial sociology framework from the 1970s -Alan Fox's work on frames of reference and trust dynamics. Our analysis of intraorganizational trust studies leads us to three conclusions. First, the large majority of intraorganizational trust research has strong unitarist underpinnings, which support a managerial agenda that is potentially detrimental to employees' (and indeed managers') long-term interests. Second, most of this research fails to explain how trust in organizations is embedded in societal and field-level institutions, hence it would benefit from looking 'beyond the factory gates' for a more complete understanding of trust dynamics in organizations. In this connection, we argue that Fox's pluralist and radical perspectives, which are under-represented in intraorganizational trust research, could provide new lines of inquiry by locating internal trust relations in a wider institutional context. Third, Fox's explanation of how low and high trust dynamics in organizations are embedded in wider society may help address the concerns about undersocialized, endogenous explanations and open the way for structure-agency analyses of building, maintaining and repairing intraorganizational trust.

Ideology in HRM Scholarship: Interrogating the Ideological Performativity of ‘New Unitarism’

“…The unitarist approach to employment relations is integral to managerialist organisational-level ideologies (Horwitz 1990;Siebert et al 2015). Unitarist ideology is dominant over pluralist ideology within mainstream management scholarship because of its consonance; in short, unitarism and mainstream management scholarship yield similar conclusions about the interests of employers and employees, and the authority of managers.…”

“…Unitarism in HRM scholarship has developed in conjunction with other mainstream theories of organisation (e.g. intraorganisational trust research that has strongly unitarist underpinnings; Siebert et al 2015) that sought to explain how the management of employees could yield competitive advantage for organisations.…”

Research into employee trust: epistemological foundations and paradigmatic boundaries

“…The under-representation of radical approaches in intra-organisational trust research has been noted before (Siebert et al, 2015), so the low number of papers in the radical humanist and structuralist paradigms was not surprising. A weakness of Burrell and Morgan's paradigms is the discrete, bipolar nature of their epistemological assumptions.…”

“…With these criticisms in mind, we set out to explore Godard's () thesis of the ‘psychologisation’ of HRM and employment relations research by focusing on employee trust in organisations, a prominent theme in current human resources (HR) research and practitioner interest. To do so, we have drawn on Burrell and Morgan's () well‐known framework of different paradigms in social science research (1) to identify the epistemological roots and paradigm boundaries of employee trust research and (2) to throw new light on employee trust research, by extending our earlier critique (Siebert et al, ) and offering some specific recommendations for future HRM research in this field.…”

Roles of Relationships Between Large Shareholders and Managers in Radical Innovation: A Stewardship Theory Perspective

“…Trust is defined as the willingness of one party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other party will act in a particular manner important to the trustor even in conditions in which the possibility for opportunism exists (Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, 1995;Siebert, Martin, Bozic, and Docherty, 2015;Zaheer, McEvily, and Perrone, 1998). Eddleston, Chrisman, Steier, and Chua (2010) argue that "trust can mean an expectation that individuals will not pursue self-interest in an opportunistic fashion, will act as stewards and align their interests with those of the organization, or will altruistically place the interests of others ahead of or equal to their own" (p. 1045).…”