LA CONFIANZA EN LA DIRECCIÓN DE LA ORGANIZACIÓN Y SU INFLUENCIA EN EL COMPROMISO ORGANIZATIVO. UN ESTUDIO EN CENTROS EDUCATIVOS.

Abstract

[EN] Trust is a key element for understanding human relations within organizations that has been studied by Management Literature for decades. Understanding the enterprise as a human organization, the phenomenon of trust is essential for the success of any organization because it directly affects the interdependence of its members, work satisfaction, the intention to remain in the organization, and the development of organizational citizenship behaviors (Dirks y Ferrin, 2001). One of the most representative models of organizational trust, from a qualitative and quantitative point of view, is the Mayer et al. (1995) proposition, which highlights the three elements that precede the generation of trust - ability, benevolence and integrity - and that make up the trustee's trustworthiness. Like organizational trust, organizational commitment is other essential factor on which the goodpractice of organizations is based. There is a generally accepted belief that the existence ofcommitment is positive for both workers and organization because having committed employees facilitates the achievement of objectives and, along with a positive employee relationship with the organization, can lead to improvements in self-esteem and involvement (Mowday,1998). One of the most significant proposals to describe the organizational commitment is offered by Meyerand Allen (1991), based on their project to create a generalizable model that understands commitment as a multifactorial concept with three dimensions: calculated, affective and normative. According to ananalysis of the academic literature, there are many studies of the relationship between trust and organizational commitment, and these mainly determine that trust is one of the key factors that explain a high level of employee involvement, which can be seen in the generation of personal bonds within the organization, the reciprocity or existence of a dynamic flow between relationship parties and, especially, the development of new trustworthy behaviors. In this theoretical framework, and based on the importance that the literature has given to the managerial trustworthiness in order to explain the relationship between trust and organizational commitment, the main research question will be the study of how the top managerial team's trustworthiness influences the level of employee affective commitment. Toward this end, the model of organizational trust by Mayer et al. (1995) and the model of organizational commitment by Meyer and Allen (1991) will be taken as a reference. More specifically, the approach of this investigation is to analyze the relationship between the three trust antecedents that make up the trustees' trustworthiness (ability, benevolence and integrity of the top management team) and the level of subordinates' commitment (the trustors), focusing specifically on affective commitment in the primary and secondary educative centers of Spain. Following the distribution of online questionnaires to primary and secondary education centers in Spain, a sample of 1026…