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Management researchers are exploring how people in different cultures build trust

Dr. Roger Mayer, a professor at the North Carolina State University Poole College of Management, is in the initial stage of a $1.28 million, three-year research project that seeks to increase knowledge about how people in different cultures come to trust others.

“Our goal is to better understand around the globe how trust is built,” Mayer said. He and his research colleagues Dr. David Schoorman, professor at Purdue University, and Dr. Hwee Hoon Tan at Singapore Management University will be using a scenario-based research tool to evaluate levels of trust among co-workers, supervisors and employees. “We plan to get data from most continents around the globe,” Mayer said.

The U.S. Air Force awarded the researchers the grant because “they understand that we work better with local populations and avoid military conflict when we understand their culture more clearly,” Mayer said. This project builds on research that Mayer and his colleagues have been doing for over 20 years.

When they first began studying organizational trust in 1992, these researchers found relatively little research focusing directly on the topic in the mainstream management journals, so they expanded their research to include such fields as psychology, philosophy, economics, and law.

“We found that scholars from diverse disciplines were presenting many insightful views and perspectives on trust but that many of them seemed to talk past one another,” they wrote in their 1995 research paper on trust, in which they sought to “integrate these perspectives into a single model.”

Their result was an integrative model on organizational trust, described in a paper by that same name published in 1995 by the Academy of Management Review (AMR). That paper has been cited more than 8,000 times by other researchers as of July 2013, according to Google Scholar, an online resource that tracks the number of times an article is cited in other research.

In 2004, the paper received the Influential Article Award 1995-1999 by the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management. In 2005, it received AMR’s Best of the Second Decade Award for Frame-Breaking, Innovative Theory, one of only two papers to have received this honor at the time.

In subsequent research, Mayer and his colleagues revisited some of the critical issues they addressed earlier and expanded their research on the topics of levels of analysis, time, control systems, reciprocity, and measurement. Results of this research were published in 2007 in the Academy of Management Review. In their paper, they also noted research by others in new areas of trust, such as affect, emotion, violation and repair, distrust, international and cross-cultural issues, and context-specific issues.

Mayer and his colleagues identified three primary characteristics that can lead to trust:

  • The ability to do the things that need to be done
  • The extent to which another party cares about an individual and his or her interests
  • Integrity: the extent to which a set of acceptable values is followed

Their previous research had shown that all three of these factors “matter globally,” Mayer said. “That’s a huge piece of it, but the important point is that they matter differently in different cultures.” In fact, the weight of the three factors can vary a lot, he said, noting, for example, that some cultures are more relationship based while others place a lot of value on ability.

In their current project, they will use experimental technology to test their model in a large-scale, systematic multi-country set of studies. Their research project, funded by the U.S. Air Force Human Performance Wing, continues through January 2016.

Mayer joined the NC State Poole College’s Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2010 and teaches organizational behavior in the college’s Jenkins MBA program.

He previously was a department chair at the University of Akron, and has served on the faculties of the University of Notre Dame, Purdue University, Baylor University, and Singapore Management University. He received a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and human resource management from the Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University.

Read more about Roger Mayer.