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The Influence of Experiential Grounding on Attributions of Initial Trustworthiness at Work

Thesis advisor: William F. Stevenson / An important and basic question, highly-relevant to managerial practice, which has been only partially asked and answered in the organizational literature, concerns the development of initial trust among co-workers. In this dissertation, I develop and test the theoretical idea that individual reflection upon affectively-charged work experience will have considerable influence on present attributions of initial trustworthiness to co-workers. The theory is primarily based in the scholarly literature on attribution theory, affective forecasting and trust concepts. Empirical results from testing across three distinct vignette-based scenarios show that the valence of relevant indirect experience is significantly and positively related to the level of initially attributed trustworthiness. Two experiential indicators, relational self-efficacy and organizational identification, are also found to be situationally and positively related to the level of initially attributed trust. The discussion details important implications for scholarship and management practice. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Organization Studies.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_101303
Date January 2008
CreatorsRoussin, Christopher Jay
PublisherBoston College
Source SetsBoston College
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, thesis
Formatelectronic, application/pdf
RightsCopyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.

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