Touchstone of Trust inside Organizations: Antecedents of high-trust manager-employee relationships

This paper investigates what makes managers trust their employees whereby the leap of faith is taken to be the irrational touchstone of high-trust interpersonal relationships to emerge. We employ an explorative-inductive... [ view full abstract ]

This paper investigates what makes managers trust their employees whereby the leap of faith is taken to be the irrational touchstone of high-trust interpersonal relationships to emerge. We employ an explorative-inductive research design using semi-structured expert-interviews. Embedded within a framework of organizational decision-making, we find five cues to matter for high-trust manager-employee dyads: (1) managers’ expectations of an employee’s trustworthiness, (2) his/her personal disposition to trust, (3) factors of the firm’s structure and organization as well as (4) manager’s decision-making errors and (5) his/her motivation to trust. Besides important implications for theory and practice, we present a possible follow-up study design using fsQCA.