In search of relevant and rigorous measures for trust research: A Yin-Yang approach to institutionalising trust research

Abstract

Welcome to the second issue of Journal of Trust Research (JTR) in 2013. With the publication of this issue, JTR celebrates its third anniversary. The current issue consists of three regular articles as well as two special forum articles. The first article is concerned with a new scale to measure the propensity to trust. JTR has now published two state-of-the-art articles concerning trust-related measures, with the first one published in the inaugural issue in 2011 (McEvily & Tortoriello, 2011). With these two articles, JTR is becoming the leading journal for publishing measurerelated articles for trust research. Further, the other two regular articles in this issue are also related to the broad topic of trust measures. More specifically, the topic of the second article is the distinctive roles of cognition-based and affect-based trust in the contexts of employee-leader and employee-co-worker ties with a special focus on the impact of the two types of trust on employee turnover intentions. The third article is about trust in leaders at different levels in the context of military leadership. Finally, the two special forum articles directly engage in a debate over the major benefits and costs of institutionalising trust research as a special domain of research. Entitled ‘Development and validation of a propensity to trust scale’, the first article focuses on the development of a new scale to measure the propensity to trust. Even though trust researchers recognise the importance of a dispositional component to forming trusting relationships in the workplace, there has been comparatively little research on propensity to trust in the literature. This article reviews the literature, discusses prior measures of propensity to trust, and integrates them to develop a scale to measure propensity to trust. Results of four validation studies suggest that this propensity to trust scale demonstrates strong psychometric properties and is empirically related to other constructs within a theoretically derived nomological network of trust. The consequence is a concise, rigorously developed, and consistently reliable scale of propensity to trust. This new measurement scale has passed a rigorous validation process that included subject matter experts and four studies designed to assess the psychometric properties of the scale. The study applies a theory-driven approach to evaluate and integrate existing scales while also developing new items, thus incorporating the best of several measures. The results of these studies indicate that the new scale is reliable and valid. Second, across two studies, this study examined the role of propensity to trust in the larger interpersonal