Straining for Shared Meaning in Organization Science: Problems of Trust and Distrust

Abstract

We present a problem-centered organizing framework of trust, ln which prominent conceptualizations of trust and distrust from the organizational and allied social sciences are categorized based on the questions they attempt to answer. The framework we outline here is intended to complement earlier typologies by suggesting alternative strategies for employing the diverse trust literature, identifying questions that could be profitably addressed through interdisciplinary research efforts, anddistinguishing disagreements where debate and research would seem to be especially worthwhile from those where such activities would appear to be much less useful.

Manager Trustworthiness or Interactional Justice? Predicting Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

“…According to the fairness heuristics theory (Lind, 2001), individuals are especially in need of fairness information when they do not have direct information about whether they can trust others (Van den Bos et al, 1998a). In most situations, the subordinate-manager dyads are already familiar with each other (Bigley and Pearce, 1998) and have sufficient information to determine whether or not to trust the other party. When specific fairness-related events occur much less frequently, it is therefore more likely that employees will use a cognitive assessment of how trustworthy their leaders are rather than focusing on and evaluating particular episodes (i.e., whether the managers display interactional fairness at multiple times).…”

Three Primary Trust Pathways Underlying Ethical Considerations

“…These three primary trust pathways capture an understanding of trust and distrust within people relationships (Bigley and Pearce, 1998;Lewicki et al, 1998;Woodward and Woodward, 2001). We can associate trust (high, low), no trust, and distrust (low, high) in the pathways with values that vary from +1 (the highest trust) to -1 (the highest distrust).…”

The Influence of Trust on Project Management Practice within the Construction Industry

“…Given that these interactions take place on a human level, the issue of trust is fundamentally significant (Gad and Shane, 2014). To this end, the value of trust in human behaviour is widely acknowledged (Bigley and Pearce, 1998), and is ultimately considered to be the essential requirement that makes human interaction possible (Romahn and Hartman, 1999).…”