When the gig isn’t up: The importance (and relevance) of trust on gig workers’ performance and commitment

Abstract

Millions of employees are now classified as gig workers – a subset of contingent employees with alternative employment arrangements. This type of work arrangement can be beneficial for both managers (e.g. cost savings, specialised skillsets) and employees (e.g. work preferences such as flexibility). Yet little research has addressed how trust for a manager might factor into gig workers’ performance when compared to traditional employees, perhaps because research has implied that trust is irrelevant to gig workers. We test this prediction across four studies to show that low trust is a double-edged sword with unfavourable and favourable outcomes. On the one hand, we find that less trust in the manager leads to lower performance and commitment among gig workers. Yet, on the other, we find that lower levels of trust help to offset or mitigate the harmful outcomes of trust violations, or unexpected, negative workplace events. Our findings highlight the important role of trust in this context of gig versus traditional workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Gig workers
• trust
• trust violation
• performance
• commitment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for this contribution.

2 Study design details from Studies 2–3 are in Appendix A–C.

3 We piloted the worker type manipulation with 342 MTurkers. We excluded 29 participants who failed the attention check at the end of the survey. Our final sample of 313 participants were an average of 32.94 years old (SD = 12.59), and 38.7% were female. Participants in the gig worker condition perceived their obligations to their manager as short-term (M = 3.10, SD = 1.15) compared to those in the traditional worker condition (M = 3.25, SD = 1.17, t(311) = 2.80, p < .01) and their involvement to be more limited (M = 3.72, SD = 1.09) than traditional workers (M = 3.25, SD = 1.17, t(311) = 3.69, p < .001).

4 We also included one-item from our trust measure (‘I trust the manager’) after the trust violation as a manipulation check. The trust violation was effective in significantly decreasing trust. We compared the one-item measure before the trust violation then again after it occurred for traditional workers (before: M = 5.19, SD = 1.10; after: M = 2.85, SD = 2.15, t(220) = −11.98, p < .001) and gig workers (before: M = 4.31, SD = 1.60; after: M = 2.35, SD = 1.99, t(220) = −11.98, p < .001). Although, we did not find post-violation trust following the trust violation to vary by worker type (t(220) = −1.80, p = .07), we found trust decreased significantly more for traditional workers (M_difference, 2.24, SE = .22) than gig workers (M_difference= 1.63, SE = .15; t(220) = −2.30, p < .05).

5 Thank you to our anonymous reviewer for this future research idea.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Campagna

Rachel Campagna, PhD, is an associate professor of Management at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Her research examines trust and relationships in a negotiation and workplace context, specifically, how trust-breaking affects people's perceptions and behaviors. Her latest work examines how emotion and time affect trust-repair strategies and efforts.

Jennifer Griffith

Jennifer Griffith, PhD, is an associate professor of Organizational Behavior within the Peter T. Paul College of Business & Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Her research interests broadly focus on increasing equity in the workplace. Most recently, she has focused on workplace policy and institutional interventions both pre-and post-hire to prevent and remedy the social and individual costs of identity-based bias and sexual misconduct.