Managerial_Trustworthy_Behaviour

MANAGERS AS INITIATORS OF TRUST: AN EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIP FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING MANAGERIAL TRUSTWORTHY BEHAVIOR Imagine driving into work one day and hearing over the radio that your employer had agreed to merge with a rival firm and that the combined company would probably employ at least 10 percent fewer workers. Ciba Geigy employees experienced this scenario in 1996, when they were surprised to learn about their company's planned merger with Sandoz. In a perfect world, this would never happen. Good news or bad, employees could trust management to give it to them straight, to mean what it said, and always to follow through on promises. But corporate America in 1996 is far from perfect. Management has lost credibility, employees are scared, and organizational trust has hit rock bottom (Caudron, 1996: 20). At the same time that trust in organizations has hit "rock bottom," researchers have shown that interpersonal trust has significant relationships with many organizational variables, such as the quality of communication (e.g., Muchinsky, 1977; Roberts & O'Reilly, 1974a,b; Yeager, 1978), performance (Earley, 1986), citizenship behaviour (McAllister, 1995), problem solving (Zand, 1972), and cooperation (Axelrod, 1984; Deutsch, 1962). Moreover, trust has long been considered fundamental to cooperative relationships (Blau, 1964; Deutsch, 1958). In recent reviews scholars have summarized common elements of the many different definitions of interpersonal trust (Hosmer, 1995; Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995). Drawing on these reviews and the work of others (Deutsch, 1962; Gambetta, 1988; Zand, 1972), we use a definition that reflects three facets. First, trust in another party reflects an expectation or belief that the other party will act benevolently. Second, one cannot control or force the other party to fulfil this expectation-that is, trust involves a willingness to be vulnerable and risk that the other party may not fulfil that expectation. Third, trust involves some level of dependency on the other party so that the outcomes of one individual are influenced by the actions of another. With these components, trust can be viewed as an attitude held by one individual-the trustor-toward another-the trustee (Robinson, 1996). This attitude is derived from the trustor's perceptions, beliefs, and attributions about the trustee, based upon his or her observations of the trustee's behaviour. Not surprisingly, most research on the antecedents of trust has focused on trustor perceptions and beliefs, such as trus- tors' perceptions of trustees' competence, benevolence, and integrity that appear to be critical conditions for trust (Butler, 1991; Mayer et al., 1995). These insights into trustors' perceptions help identify how trust arises and suggest that managers can have considerable impact on building trust. Indeed, we will argue that man- agers' actions and behaviours provide the foundation for trust and that it is actually management's responsibility to take the first step and initiate trusting relationships. However, little is known about what causes managers to behave in a trustworthy manner and, consequently, what managers can do to build trust.