Abstract
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.
Highlights
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
The first expectation for this research was that the two dimensions of warmth and competence would result in clusters of samples, consistent with the two dimensions hypothesis (Cuddy et al, 2009), and that these clusters would differ for stereotypes of trustworthy supervisors and trustworthy colleagues
Hierarchical cluster analyses found that descriptions of trustworthy supervisors and trustworthy colleagues resulted in plausible cluster solutions along the two dimensions of warmth and competence, and these cluster solutions differed depending on organizational role
Summary
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. Teamwork is built on the bonds team members have with each other in some cultures, while in others the ability to carry out tasks are more important than relationships (Zakaria & Yusof, 2015) These differences impact what cues organizational members rely on to decide whether or not to trust someone, as being willing to trust someone is “merely the expectation that the person will most likely be trustworthy” While role expectations play an important factor to formulate this trust within an organization, other research suggest the possibility to assess the trustworthiness of an individual based on social category alone (Brewer, 1981), functionally through stereotyping (Foddy, Platow, & Yamagishi, 2009; Schniter & Shields, 2020). Perceptions of trustworthiness in organizations can have a generalized effect throughout the organization, as when supervisors experience trusting relationships they are, in turn, more likely to behave in a trustworthy manner to their subordinates (De Cremer, van Dijke, Schminke, De Schutter, & Stouten, 2018)
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