Measuring trust in organisational research: Review and recommendations

Bill McEvily and Marco Tortoriello

Journal of Trust Research, 2010, vol. 1, issue 1, 23-63

Abstract: Although the organisational literature is increasingly converging on common definitions and theoretical conceptualisations of trust, it is unclear whether the same is true for the measures used to operationalise trust. In this paper, we review the organisational literature to assess the degree of sophistication and convergence across studies in how trust has been measured. Our analysis of 171 papers published over 48 years revealed that the state of the art of trust measurement is rudimentary and highly fragmented. In particular, we identified a total of 129 different measures of trust. Moreover, in only 24 instances were we able to verify that a previously developed and validated measure of trust had been replicated verbatim, and 11 of these replications were by the same authors who originated the measure. In addition to the limited degree of replication, the measurement of trust in the organisational literature is characterised by weak evidence in support of construct validity and limited consensus on operational dimensions. What makes these findings even more surprising is that our review also identified several measures of trust that have been carefully developed and thoroughly validated. We profile those measures with strong measurement properties and discuss their trade-offs. We also present a framework for measuring trust that provides guidance to researchers for selecting or developing a measure of trust and propose an agenda for future research with an emphasis on resolving enduring debates in the literature.

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/21515581.2011.552424 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:jtrust:v:1:y:2010:i:1:p:23-63

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJTR20

DOI: 10.1080/21515581.2011.552424

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Trust Research is currently edited by Peter Ping Li

More articles in Journal of Trust Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().