In this study, the authors examined the findings and implications of the research on trust in leadership that has been conducted during the past 4 decades. First, the study provides estimates of the primary relationships between trust in leadership and key outcomes, antecedents, and correlates (k = 106). Second, the study explores how specifying the construct with alternative leadership referents (direct leaders vs. organizational leadership) and definitions (types of trust) results in systematically different relationships between trust in leadership and outcomes and antecedents. Direct leaders (e.g., supervisors) appear to be a particularly important referent of trust. Last, a theoretical framework is offered to provide parsimony to the expansive literature and to clarify the different perspectives on the construct of trust in leadership and its operation.

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1674&context=lkcsb_research

Trust in Leadership: Meta-Analytic Findings and Implications for Research and Practice

Using a sample of U.K. wire makers (N = 282), the authors tested a model in which personality and work environment antecedents affect proactive work behavior via cognitive-motivational mechanisms. Self-reported proactive work behaviors (proactive idea implementation and proactive problem solving) were validated against rater assessments for a subsample (n = 60) of wire makers. With the exception of supportive supervision, each antecedent was important, albeit through different processes. Proactive personality was significantly associated with proactive work behavior via role breadth self-efficacy and flexible role orientation, job autonomy was also linked to proactive behavior via these processes, as well as directly; and coworker trust was associated with proactive behavior via flexible role orientation. In further support of the model, the cognitive-motivational processes for proactive work behavior differed from those for the more passive outcome of generalized compliance.

Modeling the Antecedents of Proactive Behavior at Work

Conflict and Conflict Management.

Purpose – Aims to explore the relationship between employee perceptions of servant leadership and leader trust, as well as organizational trust.Design/methodology.approach – Uses Laub's Organizational Leadership Assessment along with Nyhan and Marlowe's Organizational Trust Inventory.Findings – Perceptions of servant leadership correlated positively with both leader trust and organizational trust. The study also found that organizations perceived as servant‐led exhibited higher levels of both leader trust and organizational trust than organizations perceived as non‐servant‐led.Originality/value – The findings lend support to Greenleaf's view that servant leadership is an antecedent of leader and organizational trust, and to aspects of other servant leadership models.

A correlation of servant leadership, leader trust, and organizational trust

This paper reviews the existing literature regarding values in leadership. It identifies issues relating to both personal values and organizational values. The literature indicates that values affect leader behavior, as well as organizational performance. The paper also provides an overview of servant leadership theory and extrapolates applications of the values in leadership literature to three aspects of servant leadership: trust; appreciation of others; and empowerment. Values constitute the foundation of servant leadership. Fundamentally, leader values may be the underlying factors that separate servant leaders from all other leadership types.

The role of values in servant leadership

The essential ingredient of collaborative effort is trust. High performance teams are characterized by high mutual trust among members. Leaders succeed in bringing about change because they are trusted by constituents to reflect their values and aspirations. An organizational climate of trust enables employees to surface their ideas and feelings, use each other as resources, and learn together. Without trust people assume self-protective, defensive postures that inhibit learning. Handy (1996) notes that "distributed leadership," where the leadership role shifts from person to person depending on the stage of the task and nature of the skill set required, has replaced the "follow-me" type of leadership typical of the past. Similarly, De Pree (1989) refers to "roving leadership" and "abandoning oneself to the strengths of others" as strategies for successfully completing work assignments and accomplishing organizational objectives. Underlying these practices is faith in the integrity and belief in the ability of others whom an individual deems trustworthy. The practice of empowerment evidenced by organizations' reliance on self-managed teams requires management to entrust the work force with responsibility and authority. Conversely, employees express trust in managers and in coworkers by accepting these additional elements of their work roles. Team- based organizations are anticipated to outperform traditional bureaucratic structures when it comes to producing quantity and quality, making adaptive changes, and developing employees. In a longitudinal study, Banker et al. (1996) found support for the effectiveness of team-based work settings. More specifically, they reported that a company's shift from a traditional work environment to a team-based work environment (i.e., quality circles with some decision-making authority) resulted in substantial quality and productivity improvements. Trust has historically been viewed by scholars as a fundamental lubricant of social interaction but not really worthy of investigation (Gambetta, 1988). With the recent emergence of collaborative problem-solving teams in organizations, empirical evidence showing the importance of trust is needed. The present study looks at work place trust from a horizontal perspective (i.e., co-worker trust) as well as from a vertical perspective (i.e., trust of both the supervisor and top management). Thus, a multi-dimensional approach to the study of trust in organizations is presented (please see [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] for a description of the various components of this study). The scope of this study is limited primarily to the psychological processes of the trustor (see Wekselberg, 1996). However, the broader social context in which a relationship between a trustor and a trustee exists is given some attention as well. Two dimensions of interpersonal trust (i.e., cognitive-based trust and affect-based trust) and their relationship to key work place behaviors (e.g., risk taking) are examined. Trust of top management and its relationship to key variables, such as desire-to-leave the organization, is looked at as well. Using a sample of 35 full-time employees, we test five hypotheses about trust between focal employees and their co-workers, supervisors, and top management. Reciprocal measures of cognitive-based and affect-based trust were gathered for each focal employee- supervisor dyad as well as focal employee-co-worker dyad. Due to the size of the sample, we consider our research a preliminary investigation of organizational trust. Literature Review McCauley and Kuhnert (1992) pointed out that trust in the work place is a multi-dimensional construct consisting of lateral and vertical elements. Lateral trust refers to "trusting" relationships between the focal employee and co-workers while vertical trust concerns employee trust of his or her immediate supervisor, subordinates, and top management. Both usually reflect an interpersonal or dyadic form of trust, with one exception being trust of top management. …

A Multi-Dimensional Study of Trust in Organizations

This study examines the effects of an employee’s affect-based and cognition-based trust of the supervisor on that employee’s enterprising behavior. The extent to which two cultural dimensions, power distance and in-group collectivism, moderate the relationship between the trust measures and enterprising behavior is considered. Trust ratings were provided by 130 U.S. employees, 202 Turkish employees, 101 Polish employees, and 86 Russian employees. Their 519 supervisors then provided ratings of those employees’ enterprising behavior. The results show that both affect-based trust and cognition-based trust have a significant, but modest, effect on the employee’s enterprising behavior. Our findings indicate that both power distance and in-group collectivism do not moderate the proposed trust-behavior relationship although power distance almost reaches the level of significance. We call for further research on other moderating variables to explain the findings.

The Effect of Employee Trust of the Supervisor on Enterprising Behavior: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Purpose – This study examines the relationship of a supervisor's affect‐based trust and cognition‐based trust to a subordinate employee's self‐ratings of enterprising behavior, which includes creativity, risk taking, initiative, motivation, and assertiveness, and to the supervisor's and coworker's ratings of the subordinate's enterprising behavior. The extent to which the power distance and in‐group collectivism cultural variables moderate the relationship between affect‐based trust and enterprising behavior is assessed.Design/methodology/approach – Survey responses of US, Turkish, Polish, and Russian supervisor‐subordinate‐coworker triads were collected in a number of firms. Regression results were employed to test the research hypotheses.Findings – The findings of this study show that the supervisor's cognition‐based trust and affect‐based trust of the employee are associated with that employee's enterprising behavior. Significant two‐way interactions indicate that the relationship between affect‐based ...

A cross‐cultural study of supervisory trust

This study investigated the third party roles of Turkish managers and how these roles were related to the conflict management styles used by their subordinates. Questionnaire data were collected from 295 Turkish managers in seven firms. Mediation and facilitation were found to be the third party roles reported more frequently than autocratic intervention and laissez-faire. Subordinates reported increased use of collaboration and compromise toward the other party when their managers, in a third party role, were seen as using more mediation and facilitation. Competitive behavior increased when the third party was seen as autocratic. The paper discussed the relationship of these findings to cultural characteristics such as uncertainty avoidance and collectivism.

Third party roles played by Turkish managers in subordinates' conflicts

The extent to which the words and actions of a firm's top management can be trusted is a major corporate governance issue in today's U.S. organizations. Concern over CEO and top-management trustworthiness is not unique to U.S. firms. It is now an international concern. In Russia, beleaguered Gazprom, the country's largest firm with 2001 sales of $20 billion, has adopted measures to improve its corporate governance (Rossant et al., 2002). Gazprom plans to choose its next auditor by competitive bid and have a board-level audit committee. Another Russian firm, Aeroflot, which is 51% government owned, replaced its executives in 2000 because they abused their power (McCarthy and Puffer, 2002). Standard and Poor's 2001 corporate governance evaluation attributed a $140 million increase in Aeroflot's 2000 revenues to the replacement of these corrupt executives with more credible, competent ones (McCarthy and Puffer, 2002). Crangle (1998) commented on the corrupt reputation of managers at the highest levels of Eastern European firms. Disenchantment with the firm's CEO and top management appears not only to be a problem in U.S. organizations but in Eastern European firms as well. Even though corporate governance is being scrutinized primarily to fix shareholder disillusionment, the ill effects of employee distrust of a firm's top management can be considerable. The most important leadership quality is credibility, which means that, above all else, leaders must be believable, competent, and enthusiastic (Kouzes and Posner, 1995). One of the four competencies that Bennis (1999) identifies in his work on leadership is the leader's ability to generate and sustain trust among followers. According to Bennis, competence, caring, fairness, candor, and authenticity form the essential mix for leader trust. Kouzes and Posner's First Law of Leadership is: "If we don't believe in the messenger, we won't believe the message" (1995: 26). As early as 1938, Chester Barnard stated that employees quickly sense the insincerity emanating from the firm's executives. He added that executive sincerity is the key to building "adherence" (i.e., cohesion and consensus) throughout the organization. Argyris (1964) commented on the connection between top-management trust and organizational productivity. Argyris (1973) pointed to a top-management credibility gap as having the consequence of neutralizing the outcomes of organizational development programs. Rodgers and Hunter's (1991) findings demonstrated that the consistency between what top management says and does is a major determinant of the success of organization-wide change interventions such as management-by-objectives. In sum, distrust of a firm's CEO and top management may unravel investor confidence, weaken employee confidence and undermine organizational performance, while trust in a firm's CEO is a direct factor in organizational success. Because employee trust in the firm's top management seems to be critical to the firm's performance, identifying its predictors should prove useful. Gaining an understanding of the antecedents of employee trust in the CEO allows the firm to take appropriate measures in managing trust levels of the CEO and top management. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify predictors of employee trust in the firm's CEO and top management. By including samples from the United States, Poland, and Russia, our study looks at various predictors of top-management trust from the international perspective. In this article, we survey the previous literature on trust of the firm's top management, propose and test the hypotheses based on this literature, and then present and discuss our findings. Lastly, managerial implications of our findings and limitations of the study are provided. PRIOR RESEARCH Past research in management trust has targeted predictors that relate to the employee's job context and interpersonal communication. …

Selim S. Ilter

Papers

A Multi-Dimensional Study of Trust in Organizations

The Effect of Employee Trust of the Supervisor on Enterprising Behavior: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

A cross‐cultural study of supervisory trust

Third party roles played by Turkish managers in subordinates' conflicts

Predictors of Employee Trust of Their CEO: A Three-Country Study