ABSTRACT
Despite widespread appreciation of its importance, however, the paIiicular kind of trust that matters within organizations, and the bases of such trust, have been much less obvious (Creed & Miles, 1996; R. M. Kramer, 1999; Rousseau et aI., 1998; Zucker, 1986). In particular, it has been recognized that the decision to trust others in organizational contexts is different from, and in many respects more problematic than, judgments about trust that arise in many other social contexts. Because of the size and structural complexity of most organizations, for example, organizational members do not have the opportunity to engage in the sort of incremental and repeated exchanges that have been shown to facilitate the development of trust in more intimate settings, such as dyadiC relations (Lindskold, 1978; Rotter, 1980). Relatedly, it is evident that many of the social mechanisms and interpersonal processes that foster trust development in small, relatively homogeneous groups (e.g., G. Fine & Holyfield, 1996) are likely to lose their efficacy in the larger, more differentiated, and more diffuse environments of large organizations (Fox, 1974). Moreover, the often political and highly competitive nature of organizational life increases greatly the costs of misplaced trust to those who trust too readily or indiscriminately: In sharp contrast to the relatively benign penalties associated with misplaced trust encountered in experimental games, getting the "sucker's payoff' in real-world organizational encounters is not only aversive; it can be fatal to one's career.
