A strategic action fields perspective on organizational trust repair

Abstract

While the extant literature on organizational trust repair has considered the agency and trust repair actions of individual organizations, it has neglected repair following trust-damaging events affecting specific industries. Drawing on the theory of strategic action fields we ask two research questions: (1) How do reputational scandals involving a few transgressing firms affect trust in the whole institutional field? (2) Do the transgressing firms repair trust in the same way as the blameless ones in the same field? To answer these questions we investigated four cases of retail organizations that engaged in trust repair actions following a food safety scandal, two widely held to have transgressed, and two that were held to be relatively blameless. We compared the trust repair strategies of both groups, finding that even the blameless organizations felt compelled to act to repair trust. However, blameless organizations also sought to differentiate themselves from the transgressing ones by using specific strategies to restore trust.