How Leaders Develop Trust in a High Trust Organization - Many Routes to Active Trusting

Abstract

Given the prominence of corporate high trust cultures in 21st-century organizations, trust development of leaders in their followers becomes an imperative of leadership and part of a leader’s role expectations. Hence, this paper analyzes why leaders come to trust their followers and how they combine cues for trusting their followers by responding to and co-creating the specific contexts of their trust. Empirically, this study employs a concurrent nested mixed-methods design with a predominant explorative interview study with 33 medium- and top-level managers and a nested fsQCA analysis of the interview data to study effective configuration of the trust cues identified. As a result, we find four discernible trusting “recipes” of leaders towards their followers; hence four different ways how leaders shape the strategic trust imperative into “on the ground” trusting behavior. Our findings not only refine prior prominent, yet too generic models of trust but we also argue in favor of a more configurational, yet idiosyncratic view on leaders’ trusting their followers in high trust contexts.