Mayer et al. (Academy of Management Review, July 1995). Trust is the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party. This definition of trust is applicable to a relationship with another identifiable party who is perceived to act and react with volition toward the trustor. NPW: this definition appears to be applicable both in person-to-person relationships and in person-toorganization/institution relationships. Trust is determined by the trustor's propensity to trust in general and the ability, benevolence, and integrity of the trustee. The level of trust and the risk perceived by the trustor will affect trustor's risk taking behavior (actual assumming of risk). Assuming a risk and the execution of the inherent action will lead to a certain outcome, which will affect the determinants of trust in a feedback loop. Propensity to trust: A trait that leads to a generalized expectation about the trustworthiness of others. Propensity might be thought of as the general willingness to trust others. Propensity will influence how much trust one has for a trustee prior to data on that particular party being available. People with different developmental experiences, personality types, and cultural backgrounds vary in their propensity to trust (e.g., Hofstede, 1980). An example of an extreme case of this is what is commonly called blind trust.
Ability: Ability is that group of skills, competencies, and characteristics that enable a party to have influence within some specific domain. The do- main of the ability is specific because the trustee may be highly compe- tent in some technical area, affording that person trust on tasks related to that area. However, the trustee may have little aptitude, training, or ex- perience in another area, for instance, in interpersonal communication. Although such an individual may be trusted to do analytic tasks related to his or her technical area, the individual may not be trusted to initiate contact with an important customer. Thus, trust is domain specific (Zand, 1972). Benevolence: Benevolence is the extent to which a trustee is believed to want to do good to the trustor, aside from an egocentric profit motive. Benevolence suggests that the trustee has some specific attachment to the trustor. An example of this attachment is the relationship between a mentor (trustee) and a protege (trustor). The mentor wants to help the protege, even though the mentor is not required to be helpful, and there is no extrinsic reward for the mentor. Benevolence is the perception of a positive orientation of the trustee toward the trustor. Integrity: The relationship between integrity and trust involves the trustor's perception that the trustee adheres to a set of principles that the trustor finds acceptable. McFall (1987) illustrated why both the adherence to and acceptability of the principles are important. She suggested that following some set of principles defines personal integrity. However, if that set of principles is not deemed acceptable by the trustor, the trustee would not be considered to have integrity for our purposes (McFall called this moral integrity). The issue of acceptability precludes the argument that a party who is committed solely to the principle of profit seeking at all costs would be judged high in integrity (unless this principle is acceptable to the trustor; greed is good ). Such issues as the consistency of the party's past actions, credible communications about the trustee from other parties, belief that the trustee has a strong sense of justice, and the extent to which the party's actions are congruent with his or her words all affect the degree to which the party is judged to have integrity. Even though a case could be made that there are differentiable reasons why the integrity of a trustee could be perceived as higher or lower (e.g., lack of consistency is different from acceptability of principles), in the evaluation of trustworthiness it is the perceived level of integrity that is important rather than the reasons why the perception is formed. Risk Taking in Relationship: Risk is an essential component of a model of trust. There is no risk taken in the willingness to be vulnerable (i.e., to trust), but risk is inherent in the behavioral manifestation of the willingness to be vulnerable. One does not need to risk anything in order to trust; however, one must take a risk in order to engage in trusting action. The fundamental difference between trust and trusting behaviors is between a "willingness" to assume risk and actually "assuming" risk. Trust is the willingness to assume risk; behavioral trust is the assuming of risk. This differentiation parallels Sitkin and Pablo's (1992) distinction in the risk- taking literature between the tendency to take risks and risk behavior. This critical differentiation highlights the importance of clearly distinguishing between trust and its outcomes. Trust will lead to risk taking in a relationship, and the form of the risk taking depends on the situation. For example, a supervisor may take a risk by allowing an employee to handle an important account rather than handling it personally. The supervisor risks repercussions if the employee mishandles the account. Likewise, an employee may trust a manager to compensate for exceptional contributions that are beyond the scope of the employee's job. If the employee allows performance on some aspects of his or her formal
job description to suffer in order to attend to a project that is important to the supervisor, the employee is clearly taking a risk. If the supervisor fails to account for the work on the project, the employee's performance appraisal will suffer. In both examples, the level of trust will affect the amount of risk the trustor is willing to take in the relationship. In the former case, trust will affect the extent to which the supervisor will empower the employee; in the latter case, trust will affect the extent to which the employee will engage in organizational citizenship behavior. Even though the form of the risk taking depends on the situation, in both cases the amount of trust for the other party will affect how much risk a party will take. Thus, the outcome of trust is risk taking in relationship (RTR). RTR differentiates the outcomes of trust from general risk-taking behaviors because it can occur only in the context of a specific, identifiable relationship with another party. Perceived Risk: The perception of risk involves the trustor's belief about likelihoods of gains or losses outside of considerations that involve the relationship with the particular trustee. Assessing the risk in a situation involves consideration of the context, such as weighing the likelihood of both positive and negative outcomes that might occur (Bierman, Bonini, & Hausman, 1969; Coleman, 1990). The stakes in the situation (i.e., both the possible gains and the potential losses) will affect the interpretation of the risk involved. To understand how trust actually affects a person's taking a risk, one must separate trust from other situational factors that necessitate trust (i.e., perceived risk in the current model). Outcomes: The outcome of the trusting behavior (favorable or unfavorable) will influence trust indirectly through the perceptions of ability, benevolence, and integrity at the next interaction. For example, a manager empowers an employee to deal with a task that is critical to the manager's performance. If the employee's performance of the task is very good, the manager's perception of the employee's trustworthiness will be enhanced. Conversely, if the employee performs poorly and damages the manager's reputation, the manager's perception of the employee's trustworthiness is diminished. The manager may attribute the employee's high or low performance to ability, benevolence, and/or integrity, depending upon the situation. Predictability relates specifically to consistency and regularity of behaviour (and as such is distinct from competence or integrity). WHEN TO CODE AS BENEVOLENCE AND WHEN AS INTEGRITY? Benevolence is defined as the extent to which a trustee is believed to want to do good to the trustor, aside from an egocentric profit motive. Benevolence suggests that the trustee has some specific attachment to the trustor. The benevolence construct reflects benign motives and a personal degree of kindness toward the other party, and a genuine concern for their welfare. Items that reflect the benevolence of a party should therefore refer to doing good to the trustor where such benevolence is not be definition to be expected. Being good to employees and customers, for example, is not so much benevolence as it is good behavior in general (part of the trustees integrity). Being good to a supplier, is less normal and more dependent on the specific attachment the trustee has towards the trustor (in trustor s perception). The same goes for being good to the individual employee (the respondent).
Integrity involves the trustor's perception that the trustee adheres to a set of principles (personal integrity) that the trustor finds acceptable (moral integrity), encompassing honesty and fair treatment, and the avoidance of hypocrisy. Items could reflect such issues as the consistency of the party's past actions, credible communications about the trustee from other parties, belief that the trustee has a strong sense of justice, and the extent to which the party's actions are congruent with his or her words, as such issues all affect the degree to which the party is judged to have integrity. Items should therefore reflect some moral standard to which the trustee is perceived to adhere to in general and that apply not just in case of a specific attachment between the trustee and the trustor.
Dietz and Den Hartog (Personnel Review 2006) Trust as a belief The first form of trust is a subjective, aggregated, and confident set of beliefs about the other party and one s relationship with her/him, which lead one to assume that the other party s likely actions will have positive consequences for oneself. Another way of representing this belief is as an assessment of the other party s trustworthiness. Trust as a decision The second form of trust is the decision to actually trust the other party. This is the stage at which the belief in the others trustworthiness is manifested partially in trust itself. For a genuine state of trust to exist both the expectation of trustworthy behaviour and the intention to act based upon it must be present. Trust as an action For A to demonstrate unequivocally her/his trust in B, (s)he must follow through on this decision by engaging in any of the trust-informed risk-taking behaviours proposed by different authors. Gillespie usefully divides these into two broad categories: reliance -related behaviours (such as, for example, a manager surrendering control over valuable resources or decisions to a subordinate, or deliberately reducing control over, or monitoring of, the subordinate s actions), and disclosure in the sense of sharing potentially incriminating or damaging information with another party (such as a management team revealing commercially sensitive future strategy to union officials).
Dietz and Den Hartog (Personnel Review 2006) Deterrence-based trust The first degree, deterrence-based trust, does not comply with the definition we use here. There is no positive expectation of goodwill and only through the threat of external sanctions and force is the expectation of compliance guaranteed; there is effectively no risk and no probabilities to consider. Rather than reflecting trust, it is a manifestation of distrust. Calculus-based trust Nor, too, can calculus-based trust be considered real trust in this sense since, as the name suggests, trust is only considered a worthwhile strategy on the basis of a strict cost-benefit analysis, but a deep a priori suspicion of the other remains. Moreover, as Figure 1 suggests, the decisive evidence is likely to come from sources other than the trustee. Knowledge-based trust Between calculus-based trust and knowledge-based trust a threshold is crossed when suspicions recede to be replaced by positive expectations based on confident knowledge about the other party, including their motives, abilities and reliability. Real trust, as it is most commonly defined in the literature, begins here. Relational-based trust As these expectations are vindicated by experience, more powerful degrees of trust may develop. The much stronger confidence in the other party that is depicted in relational-based trust is more subjective and emotional in nature. It is derived more from the quality of the relationship over time than from observation of the other party s specific behaviours. This is trust coming more from an appraisal of the other party s dependable goodwill than from observation of their reliable habits. You can make a comparable distinction between the trustee s characteristics (i.e. their personal qualities and motives), and process-based evidence. Identification-based trust Lastly, the overwhelming affection and complete unity of purpose described in identification-based trust is such that both parties assume a common identity, and each party can represent the other s interests with their full confidence. The last two are equivalents of social trust. Trust evaluations can be represented as being either cognitive-based (i.e. informed by the kind of careful evaluation discussed above) or affective-based (i.e. informed more by emotional responses to the other party). A minimum level of cognition-based trust is necessary for affective forms to materialise Some interpret the former as covering calculus-based and knowledge-based trust, while the latter corresponds more to relational-based and identification-based trust.
Vanhala (Workshop on Trust, 2010) Interpersonal trust is treated as an issue of lateral trust i.e. individual employees trust towards other employees and vertical trust i.e. trust towards immediate supervisors. Impersonal trust is based on roles, systems and reputation, whereas interpersonal trust is based on interpersonal interaction between individuals within a particular relationship. The impersonal dimension of organizational trust is usually called institutional trust. Trust in the organization is the evaluation of an organization s trustworthiness as perceived by the employee, i.e. confidence that it will perform an action that is beneficial or at least not detrimental to him or her. As a summary it can be stated that the organizational trust refers to trust in co-workers and other employees (lateral trust) and trust in supervisors and management (vertical trust). Lateral and vertical trust can further be divided to trust in other party s competence, benevolence and reliability (or predictability or integrity, in other definitions). Third dimension of the organizational trust is impersonal by nature (impersonal trust) and can be divided to capability and fairness of the employee organization.
Buitendijk, Hoekstra en Timmerman 2009 (Management Executive)