Distrust: Forgotten, yet Promising

Personnel Psychology, 2005

It has been consistently argued in prior research that mutual trust is essential for maintaining inter-organizational relationship quality and performance. The mirror side of trust - distrust - has received only scant attention, however. This empirical and qualitative study focuses on the roles of and relationships between trust and distrust in inter-organizational relationships. The results reveal that the two concepts are not merely the opposite ends of a continuum, and these phenomena may exist simultaneously. Moreover, they could both be understood as an essential means of managing uncertainty and risks in relationships.

9th Annual Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction 2010 Pre-ICIS Workshop at the International Conference on System Sciences, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, December 12, 2010

This paper proposes the Unified Trust-Distrust Model (UTDM) to reconcile the differences in the literature on the complex relationship between trust and distrust. Extant research on trust and distrust follows two main approaches that are built on contradictory assumptions: trust has been conceptualized as a different construct than distrust by some researchers, while others consider trust and distrust to represent opposite ends of a single continuum.

Organization Science, 2003

Revista de Psicología del Trabajo y de las Organizaciones

Trust has been a major focus of organizational research accumulating evidence of the substantial and varied benefits it entails as a form of social capital with constructive consequences (Kramer, 1999). For instance, trust in organizations increases employees' job satisfaction, organizational identification, and intention to stay (Restubog, Hornsey, Bordia, & Esposo, 2008) while employees who trust their supervisors have higher job satisfaction, higher job performance, and lower turnover intentions (Krasman, 2014). On the contrary, distrust has for long been considered a problem in daily organizational life (Sitkin & Roth, 1993), the dark or undesirable side of trust. It accounts for low levels of employee engagement due to the use of resources for control purposes, which reduces work efficiencies and leads to lack of cooperation and information distortion (Bromiley & Cummings, 1995) and unwillingness to take risks and to refrain sharing perspectives and knowledge (Bijlsma-Frankema, 2004). Experimental studies are drawing a different picture with some beneficial consequences of distrust and some harms of trust. Under distrust, individuals activate incongruent and remote associations that increase cognitive flexibility and creativity (Mayer & Mussweiler, 2011). Also on the positive side, attitudes of distrust have been found to be better predictors of safety performance compared to attitudes of trust (Conchie & Donald, 2006). On the other hand, unconditional trust appears to be an extremely dangerous strategy for managing social relations and an "excess" of trust explains the mechanisms that open the door for abusive conducts by a party and defenselessness by the other

M@n@gement, 2004

Foundations and Trends® in Management, 2017

Parallel to the very large scholarly interest in trust, scholars in management and related disciplines have made the case for the importance of distrust as a related but distinct construct. This paper critically assesses current literature on distrust in organizational settings. We first take stock of the extant research on organizational distrust and suggest an integrative framework.

Organization science, 2001

Numerous researchers from various disciplines seem to agree that trust has a number of important benefits for organizations, although they have not necessarily come to agreement on how these benefits occur. In this article, we explore two fundamen-tally different ...

A considerable amount of research has examined trust since our 1995 publication. We revisit some of the critical issues that we addressed and provide clarifications and extensions of the topics of levels of analysis, time, control systems, reciprocity, and measurement. We also recognize recent research in new areas of trust, such as affect, emotion, violation and repair, distrust, international and cross-cultural issues, and context-specific models, and we identify promising avenues for future research. As we wrote our 1995 paper on trust (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995), we were struck by the relative scarcity of research in the mainstream management literature focusing directly on trust. This led us to several bodies of literature , including management, psychology, philosophy , and economics. We found that scholars from diverse disciplines were presenting many insightful views and perspectives on trust but that many of them seemed to talk past one another. Our goal was to integrate these perspectives into a single model. This work came to fruition at about the same time as several other works on trust. Papers on trust by Hosmer (1995) and McAllister (1995) were also published in Academy of Management journals that year, followed the next year by a book edited by Kramer and Tyler (1996). The con-fluence of these works, fueled by practical concerns raised by now infamous government and corporate scandals over the next decade, produced a groundswell of interest in understanding this basic and ubiquitous construct. Since we were drawing perspectives from multiple disciplines as inputs to the model, we wanted to provide a model that was generally applicable and would be used across multiple disciplines. We were gratified to find in a recent search that our paper has been cited over 1,100 times (according to Google Scholar). In addition to management and general business, it has been cited in such diverse areas as marketing, sociology, health care, and agribusiness. We would like to use this opportunity to revisit some of the issues raised by our 1995 paper and review how the field has dealt with them. We will also discuss the new concerns and opportunities for future research on trust.

Introduction to Theories of Human Resources and Employment Relations, 2019

Introduction to the book chapter: Interest in trust amongst both human resource management (HRM) scholars and practitioners has grown significantly in recent decades. While studies have identified a range of benefits for both employees and organizations, in general terms trust acts as a lubricant, facilitating cooperation and collaboration and strengthening performance (Searle and Skinner, 2011). It is the connection of trust to positive behaviours supporting the achievement of organizational goals which resonates with the central premise of HRM, it being concerned with structuring human interactions within an organizational context in order to maximize performance (Tzafrir, 2005; Tzafrir et al., 2004). Research suggests that organizations with high trust cultures not only attract the best talent, but also are in a position to pay them more, trust promoting superior levels of performance (Hughes et al., 2018; Zak, 2017). Not surprisingly, the importance of trust in the employment relationship has been widely reported, researchers highlighting it as an integral part of the psychological contract (Guest, 2004), being crucial to the success of relationships both within and between organizations (Herriot et al., 1998), and enabling employees to be more engaged, productive and aligned to the organization’s purpose (Zak, 2017). We begin this chapter by defining trust and outlining key trust models which explain its development. We then discuss the different trust relationships within the organizational context before highlighting the benefits of trust and its importance to HRM and the management of people at work. We conclude by discussing areas where knowledge is more limited, particularly in relation to virtual teams and distrust, outlining opportunities for further development of theory and arguing for a more epistemologically pluralist future.