Welcome
Welcome to Understanding Trust in Organizations: A Multilevel Perspective. Approximately three years ago, we examined the thriving research literature on organizational trust and trust repair, viewed through multiple lenses: different conceptualizations of the core constructs, different disciplinary perspectives, different contexts in which trust was being observed, and the role of trust as an antecedent, mediating, moderating, or outcome variable. An area we noted that was ripe for concerted effort and systematic inquiry was how trust was being addressed at various organizational levels. While much of the early trust literature was developed around interpersonal constructs, a parallel set of literatures has developed around team and group trust and organizational trust. We believed that the trust literature had reached enough of a level of maturity that these multilevel perspectives – at the individual, team, and organizational levels and beyond – needed to be brought together and conceptualized; hence the purpose of this volume.
We invited leading scholars from around the world whose expertise and previous work could offer insight into a multilevel perspective on organizational trust. The challenge we gave to our contributors was to break new conceptual ground to advance our understanding of how trust functions and operates across multiple levels of analysis. We committed to providing our authors with the space and freedom to take risks in their theorizing and exploration of multilevel trust. Reminiscent of the process used to develop other influential volumes on trust (e.g., Searle, Nienaber, & Sitkin, 2018), we invited our contributors to exchange ideas and give feedback to each other on their developing papers at workshops at the 2018 and 2019 meetings of the Academy of Management, as well as to present their papers at the 2020 Academy of Management.
We the editors have enjoyed the opportunity to assemble this collection of invited chapters and work with the contributors as they developed and strengthened their chapters to form the excellent contributions within this volume. We are also grateful that the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) recognized the value of this collection of work and was willing to publish it as a volume in their Organizational Frontiers Series.
Why This Book?
Trust is an issue of great organizational, national, and societal importance. Trust underpins and supports effective leadership, teamwork, employee and stakeholder relationships, knowledge sharing, and innovation, as well as broader organizational effectiveness and market participation (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012; Searle et al., 2018). Yet recent public surveys, such as those by the Edelman Trust Barometer, the Gallup organization, and the Pew Research Centre, reveal a disconcerting trend of declining trust in business, government, and some societal institutions and organizations. This has resulted in unprecedented interest in and focus on trust in organizations, including business, government, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as CEOs, line managers, organizational specialists, and academics.
Interest in trust research has increased accordingly over the last quarter-century. The field has now reached a stage where it is time for it to focus attention away from the fundamental nature of trust, to explore its nuances and complexities, including its dyadic nature, temporal fluctuations, multiparty dynamics, contextual influences, and trust as context. Importantly, it is becoming more apparent that a full understanding of trust in the workplace requires a multilevel assessment of its processes and dynamics, embedded in multiple networks and systems and enacted by multiple organizational actors and entities (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012; Gillespie & Dietz, 2009).
The seminal definition of trust in the organizational literature – the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995; Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998) – is multilevel in nature: both the trusting party (trustor) and the referent of trust (trustee) can be individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions, and trust can take place and be examined at these different levels of analysis. As Schoorman, Mayer, and Davis (2007) note, their seminal model of organizational trust was developed to support the investigation of trust across multiple levels. Research has since studied trust across different levels of analysis in a great variety of organizational contexts (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012).
Despite the inherently multilevel nature of the trust concept, for many years, measurement tools and research evidence on interpersonal trust at the individual level have been used to understand trust at other higher levels of analysis: within and between groups and organizations. This approach assumes that the nature of trust and its nomological network do not differ across levels of analysis, but are rather isomorphic. However, this approach is questionable. Trust in the workplace – whether between individuals or within and between teams, networks, and organizations – is embedded in a multilevel system where top-down influences from the system and bottom-up effects of member interactions jointly affect trust. Yet research has largely focused on a single level of analysis in studying trust and its antecedents and consequences. Furthermore, research at different levels of analysis, such as interpersonal trust, team trust, and trust within organizations, has developed independently with little cross-fertilization, creating silos in our knowledge of trust.
Recent work has identified both similarities and differences in trust across levels (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012) and highlighted the opportunities afforded by considering trust at different levels (e.g., Currall & Inkpen, 2002; De Jong & Dirks, 2012; Gillespie & Dietz, 2009; Schilke & Cook, 2013; Vanneste, 2016). The increased interest and importance in understanding trust from a multilevel perspective is highlighted by a recent special issue of the Journal of Trust Research (Fulmer & Dirks, 2018), and calls in prominent reviews for future trust research to adopt a multilevel perspective (e.g., Bachmann, Gillespie, & Priem, 2015; Costa et al., 2018; Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012; Kramer & Lewicki, 2010). As these reviews point out, by taking level effects into account, researchers can gain a more nuanced and realistic understanding of organizational trust and provide more precise and relevant insights for practitioners.
Aims and Scope of the Volume
This book aims to both synthesize and promote new scholarly work examining the emergence and embeddedness of multilevel trust within organizations. It advances understanding of how trust within organizations is affected by both macro and micro forces, such as those operating at the societal, institutional, community, network, organizational, group/team, and individual (e.g., leaders, managers, and employees) levels.
To our knowledge, it is the first volume that takes a focused multilevel perspective to understand organizational trust. This approach differs radically from prior scholarship that separately considers trust at different levels of analysis and hence is less equipped to uncover the embedded nature of trust and the dynamic interplay between micro and macro levels that influence trust in the workplace. The book provides much-needed integration as well as novel conceptual and empirical insights on the various multilevel trust dynamics and processes that play out in organizations. We see this as a timely and necessary springboard for ...
