The Role of Culture, Workgroup Membership, and Organizational Status on Cooperation and Trust: An Experimental Investigation

Trust violation at work: Lived experiences of American, Indian, and Chinese employees

Despite decades of research establishing that trust is critical to successful collaboration, the experience of trust violation is poorly understood independent of trust repair. Furthermore, despite increasing globalization, most organizational research on trust violation is heavily Westernized. This semi-structured interview study explored subjective experiences of trust violation at work across 23 individuals from the United States, India, and China to better understand similarities and differences in the unfolding reactions to trust violations across cultures. Our inductive thematic analysis identifies some trust violation triggers common to all three nationalities (i.e., psychological contract breach, professional attack, lack of work ethic) and some triggers unique to certain nationalities (i.e., lack of acknowledgment for Indian workers; excessive monitoring and injustice perceptions for Chinese workers). Regarding reactions to trust violations, American workers emphasized a central reaction of anger, Indian workers described more varied emotional and behavioral reactions possibly reflecting cultural complexity, and Chinese workers described reactions of emotion suppression and behavioral avoidance that align with theories of face. For American and Indian workers, violations damaged both interpersonal relationships and attitudes towards one’s job, whereas for Chinese workers, violations damaged only the focal interpersonal relationship. We discuss the implications of our descriptive, nationality-specific unfolding models of trust violation for advancing cross-cultural research on trust violations at work.

A 10 nation exploration of trustworthiness in the workplace

In the context of the workplace, and especially in today’s often fast-paced, cross-cultural and virtual work environment, a basic type of trust—“swift trust”—forms quickly based on cognitive processes and beliefs, or stereotypes, of another. Interpersonal trust is in large part based on these contextualized assessments of the extent to which another person is trustworthy. While trust across cultural boundaries has been examined, there is a lack of research investigating how trustworthiness is determined cross-culturally, especially with respect to what heuristics are used in the development of trust. The current project explored how trustworthiness is conceptualized and described for both colleagues and supervisors across 10 nations using the Stereotype Content Model. Qualitative descriptors of trustworthy supervisors and colleagues were coded based on the importance ascribed to warmth and competence, and these codes were used as the basis for cluster analyses to examine similarities and differences in descriptors of role-based trustworthiness. Both differences and similarities in the expectations of trustworthiness were found across the national samples. Some cultures emphasized both warmth and competence as equally important components to developing trustworthiness, some emphasized only warmth, while others emphasized only competence. Variations of trustworthiness stereotypes were found in all but two national samples based on role expectations for supervisors and colleagues. Data from the GLOBE project related to societal cultural practices and cultural leadership prototypes were drawn on to discuss findings.

Professional status and norm violation in email collaboration

Purpose

Status is a central aspect of teamwork relationships and successful collaboration in teams, both online and offline. Status group membership and status perception shape behavioural expectations and norm perceptions of what is appropriate, but despite their importance have been neglected in previous research. Status effects are of special interest in online collaboration, e.g. via email, where no immediate feedback or non-verbal/paraverbal communication and direct observation is possible. The purpose of this study is to address this gap in research.

Design/methodology/approach

An experimental scenario study with two different professional status groups (lecturers and students) tested status effects on causal attributions, intergroup bias and emotional and collaborative responses to perceived norm violations in emails.

Findings

Results overall showed three key findings: a “black-sheep-effect” with harsher negative attributions for same status members, more aggression and less cooperation towards lower status senders and stronger (negative) emotional reactions towards high status senders.

Originality/value

The findings are important for managing professional online communication because negative personal attributions, strong emotions and aggressive behaviours can increase team conflict, lead to mistakes and generally undermine performance.