Antecedents and Consequences of Frontline Employee’s Trust-in-Supervisor and Trust-in-Coworker

Seonggoo Ji,Ihsan Ullah Jan

doi:10.3390/su12020716

Abstract

Based on social exchange theory, this study investigates the antecedents and consequences of a frontline employee’s trust-in-supervisor and a frontline employee’s trust-in-coworker in a single framework. A personally administered survey was conducted to collect data from 203 frontline employees of coffee shops in the Republic of Korea. Covariance-based structural equation modeling was applied using AMOS 21.0 to explore the proposed relationships. The results show that abusive supervision is negatively related to frontline employee’s trust-in-supervisor, whereas supervisor support and communication quality have significant positive effects on frontline employee’s trust-in-supervisor. Similarly, coworker ostracism has a significant negative effect on frontline employee’s trust-in-coworker, whereas coworker harmony and communication quality have significant positive effect on frontline employee’s trust-in-coworker. Finally, the results show that a frontline employee’s trust-in-supervisor predicts a frontline employee’s supervisor cooperation, and a frontline employee’s trust-in-coworker leads to a frontline employee’s coworker cooperation.

Highlights

Employees in general and frontline employees in particular are very important resources because of their significant roles in the overall operation of businesses
The researchers first eliminated those questionnaires with missing data. The researchers eliminated those questionnaires that reported either the absence of supervisors or coworkers. This is because the current study investigates antecedents and consequences of frontline employee trust-in-supervisor and frontline employee trust-in-coworker, so only those questionnaires should be retained for formal analysis that have reported the presence of supervisor and at least two coworkers in the coffee shop
In order to check the validity of proposed model, the maximum likelihood method was applied by conducting confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) through AMOS 21

Summary

Introduction

Employees in general and frontline employees in particular are very important resources because of their significant roles in the overall operation of businesses. A handful studies in the prior literature have independently examined trust-in-supervisor and trust-in-coworker [12,13,14,15,16,17,18] there is a need to investigate interpersonal trust—frontline employees’ trust-in-supervisor and frontline employees’ trust-in-coworker in a single framework. This is because, the position of frontline employees is unique in that the attitude and behavior of frontline employees are generally influenced by their supervisors and coworkers. In the prior literature, researchers have examined either the positive antecedents or negative antecedents of trust-in-supervisor and trust-in-coworker [13,14,15,16,17], yet the idea of integrating both the negative and positive antecedents of trust-in-supervisor and trust-in-coworker into a single framework is still underdeveloped and needs proper scholarly attention

Methods

Results

Conclusion