Abstract
Trust as a concept found its way to business literature and it became a widely-used variable. Societal trust is systematically measured since 1960s. Later, it was discovered that two statements, which were used as opposite ends of dichotomous questions, are not truly opposite. The aim of this article is to investigate if gender and personality traits influence rating of these two statement. And if so, if it is possible to account for these factors and to create a robust trust indicator from these two statements after all. Big Five Inventory-10 is used to measure personality traits. Findings are that one measure of trust is significantly influenced by agreeableness, while the other is possibly influenced by neuroticism but the relationship is only borderline significant. With regards to the second goal, it is not possible to create a single trust indicator with reasonable properties even with adding personality traits into the equation. This article is a replication of a previous study. This study uses 1-5 Likert scales while the previous used 1-7 Likert scales, while all the questions/statements stayed the same. The difference is that both measures (not only the first measure) of trust were significantly influenced by agreeableness, while neuroticism had a borderline significant impact on the first, not the second measure of trust.
Highlights
Trust is not something solely in the domain of sociology anymore
The most standard question to measure trust is to ask “Generally speaking, do you believe that most people can be trusted, or can’t you be too careful in dealing with people?” It was used by Rosenberg (1956) for the first time in the United States
The second goal of the article was to investigate if it is possible to account for personality traits and to create a robust single-dimension trust indicator from trust and mistrust questions
Summary
Trust is not something solely in the domain of sociology anymore. It became a widely investigated concept in business research in the last two decades. It influences behavior when it comes to barter exchanges (Ostroy and Starr, 1990), off-line (Calvo Porral and Levy-Mangin, 2016) and on-line purchases (Delina and Drab, 2010) It influences organization behavior as well, e.g. the relationship between a superior and subordinated (Krasman, 2014) or knowledge-sharing (Peralta and Saldanha, 2014). Almond and Verba (1963) used it for the first time on a larger scales in 1960, the study involved five countries. American National Election Studies included this question in many of its surveys
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
