ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the emerging literature on organizational trust repair and the insights it offers on the challenging process of restoring trust, such as that faced by Volkswagen. It focuses on trust repair in the referent of the organization and institution. Organizational trust is a fundamental building block of organizations. However, as the corporate governance crises demonstrate, trust is often very difficult to restore once broken. The complexity of organizational trust repair reflects that the 'trustors' of organizations and institutions represent a diversity of stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, customers, shareholders, regulators, governments and the general public. Regulation, formal rules and controls are theorized to facilitate trust repair after a breach by constraining untrustworthy behaviour and thereby preventing future organizational trust violations. The majority of trust repair studies place undue faith in managers' ability to manage trust relations, and ignore the role of external factors that might affect organizational reintegration.
