A critique of utilitarian trust: The case of the Dutch insurance sector

Abstract

The organizational trust literature relies strongly on the notion of trust and trustworthiness as a calculative cause-and-effect relationship between actors. This utilitarian notion of trust has been critiqued by a more moral inspired body of work that focuses less on cause-and-effect relation-ships and more on trust values. This idea of intrinsic trust highlights construct inconsistencies related to utilitarian trust, which, it is argued, is deficient, incomplete and misleading. Our empir-ical study of the Dutch insurance sector reveals process inconsistencies that help to explain why the calculation of trust in a utilitarian sense is impossible in practice and is a barrier to the unam-biguous assessment of individual needs and utility. We identify three mechanisms that underpin these process inconsistencies: insufficient information; complex behavioural dynamics; and a convoluted pattern of stakeholder influence on trust relationships. These empirical findings ena-ble a categorization of the critiques so far and provide support for the stream of work on intrinsic trust.