ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a multilevel framework of control–trust dynamics that describes how the decisions and actions of senior leaders, mid-level managers, and front-line employees interconnect in organizational environments. By providing a map of the conceptual landscape encompassing multilevel control–trust dynamics, this chapter highlights key factors that influence actors’ trust-building and control activities at various organizational levels. It explains how, at each organizational level (senior leaders, managers, employees) actors’ control- and trust-building actions, as well as their attitudes and exhibited levels of performance, are influenced by the decisions and actions of other actors who exist above and below them in the organizational hierarchy. Using this conceptual map to outline key relationships, this chapter proposes an agenda for future multilevel research that provides scholars with information they can use to develop more complete and accurate theoretical models of control–trust dynamics in organizations.
