Investigating multidimensional organisational trust through breach

ABSTRACT

Objective

The literature shows employee trust in leaders supports organisational performance, despite much still being unknown about the employee-leader trust relationship. This study aimed to explore employee trust in leaders through trust breaches to broaden knowledge about the multidimensional nature of the trust construct and provide organisations with a focus on how to improve employee trust in leaders.

Method

Trust breaches were explored using hypothetical vignettes. Participants received one scenario with a combination of a relationship treatment and behavioural treatment. There were three relationship treatments: no relationship, new relationship, and established relationship between employee and leader. There were also eight unique behavioural treatments of trust breach between employee and leader in the workplace (for example, betraying agreements).

Results

Using one-way and two-way analysis of variance, findings showed that only those allocated to the established relationship group were likely to trust the hypothetical leader in the future. While all behavioural breaches negatively influenced future trust, the behaviours of leader lying to, betraying confidentiality of, and publicly belittling the employee were significantly less likely to engender future employee trust.

Conclusion

This study offers a novel perspective to exploring employee-leader multidimensional organisational trust by investigating trust breaches according to type of relationship and behavioural breach type. This study showed behavioural breaches negatively influence perceptions of future employee trust in leaders. It also reaffirms that established relationships are most likely to be resilient to trust breaches over nominal or absent relationships between employees and their leader.

Key Points

What is already known about this topic:

1. Employee trust in leaders has been considered a unidimensional and multidimensional construct.

2. Employee trust in leaders is essential for organisational performance.

3. Trust is hard to rebuild after a trust breach.

What this topic adds:

1. Trust breaches, like trust itself, have relational and behavioural nuances.

2. Behavioural trust breaches negatively influence likelihood the employee will trust the leader in the future.

3. The relationship between employee and leader determines the likelihood the employee will trust the leader in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• psychological contract
• psychological contract breach
• psychological contract violation
• leadership

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge all our participants for their time and contribution to this study.

Disclosure statement

Sarah Fischer, Arlene Walker, and Shannon Hyder did not receive any financial or other support. Sarah led the design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation, and writing of the article, under the supervision of Arlene Walker and Shannon Hyder was part of Sarah’s PhD. Julian Clarke contributed to the analysis, interpretation, and writing of the article as part of his Honours thesis whilst studying Psychology at Deakin University. No conflicts of interest exist for any of the authors of this study.

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.