Getting to Know You

Abstract

Despite recent theoretical advances, the pattern of trust development between coworkers has yet to receive focused longitudinal attention. Furthermore, current theory suggests that employees attend to an array of independent trust cues in any given situation but fails to identify which cues are important when. In a four-wave longitudinal field study, we demonstrate how new coworker intentions to engage in trust behaviors (reliance and disclosure) evolve during employee socialization and examine the trust cues that prime decisions to trust. We present a latent growth model of trust development that reveals, for the first time, that reliance and disclosure intentions in early work relationships develop in a positive, nonlinear pattern over time. Furthermore, the study indicates that propensity to trust has a statistically significant effect on the initial status of intention to rely on and disclose information to coworkers but not on changes in trust behavior over time. The multiwave design permits comprehensive assessment of the change in impact of different trust cues over time and demonstrates that the importance of certain cues varies depending primarily on the type of trust in question and potentially changes as a relationship matures. We discuss the theoretical implications and directions for future research.