Do your employees (collectively) trust you? The importance of trust climate beyond individual trust

Lixin Jiang and Tahira M. Probst

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2015, vol. 31, issue 4, 526-535

Abstract: Current conceptualizations of trust focus largely on the individual level of analysis; neither theory nor empirical study has explored group-level trust on individual-level outcomes. Using a multilevel framework, we hypothesized that both individual-level trust in management and unit-level trust climate would be positively associated with employee job satisfaction, affective commitment, job security, service motivation, and work engagement, and negatively associated with turnover intentions and burnout. Moreover, trust climate would moderate the relationships between individual-level trust and those job-related outcomes. Data collected from 468 faculty members nested in 41 departments at a large university supported our hypotheses. Multilevel analyses revealed that trust climate explained variance in employee outcomes beyond that accounted for by individual trust, and the positive relationship between individual trust and job security was stronger and the negative relationship between trust and burnout was weaker in departments with higher trust climate. These results underscore the theoretical importance of considering the cross-level influence of trust climate and suggest that organizations should focus on creating a positive climate promoting trust beyond fostering individual trust.

Keywords: Trust climate; Multilevel analysis; Trust; Organizational climate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956522115000676
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:scaman:v:31:y:2015:i:4:p:526-535

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/872/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/872/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.scaman.2015.09.003

Access Statistics for this article

Scandinavian Journal of Management is currently edited by Janne Tienari

More articles in Scandinavian Journal of Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().