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Trust Trajectories as a Function of Violation Type and Repair Efforts

Across domains, organizations and society are facing a trust deficit (Twenge, Campbell, & Carter, 2014). This is problematic, as trust is important to a variety of critical organizational outcomes, such as perceived task performance, team satisfaction, relationship commitment, and stress mitigation (Costa, Roe, & Taillieu, 2001), and has been cited as a motivator for cooperation and knowledge transfer due to its capacity to reduce fear and risk of exploitation (Chen et al., 1998; Fleig-Palmer & Schoorman, 2011; Irwin & Berigan, 2013; Yamagishi & Sato, 1986), and a key component of collaboration. As organizations increasingly rely upon collaboration for achieving important outcomes, it is of critical importance that organizations understand how to not only develop interpersonal trust in collaborative partnerships to facilitate these positive outcomes, but also the way in which interpersonal trust is broken and can be repaired when problems inevitably arise. Though research has begun to investigate trust violation and trust repair, relatively little is known about trust development, violation, and repair as a process that unfolds over time. This is problematic, as cross-sectional studies fail to capture change, both in terms of how trust itself changes as well as how the effect of a violation or the utility of a repair strategy may be weaker or stronger in the long-term than the short-term. Thus, findings from a single point in time may result in different conclusions and recommendations than those that would result from long-term investigation. Therefore, this study examines how interpersonal trust patterns unfold within individuals, and how these patterns differ between individuals depending on the type of violation and the repair strategy employed. An experimental study using discontinuous growth modeling to examine intraindividual and interindividual differences in trust processes found that generally, trust was negatively impacted more after an intentional ("will do") violation as compared to a competence ("can do") violation, such that it had a greater impact on character assessments than a competence violation and also damaged perceptions of ability as much as a competence violation. These negative impacts carried over into trust restoration, which was significantly slower after an intentional violation than a competence violation. Furthermore, study findings suggest that after an intentional violation, trust restored more quickly when surveillance was implemented than when compensation was offered. Though the opposite did not hold true for a competence violation, the findings did approach significance. Drawing from these findings, implications and future research recommendations are discussed.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-2251
Date01 January 2015
CreatorsThayer, Amanda
PublisherSTARS
Source SetsUniversity of Central Florida
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceElectronic Theses and Dissertations

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