Outcomes of Organizational Trust: A Multi-Level Perspective and Meta-Analytic Examination

Abstract

Recognizing that organizational trust is inherently multilevel, scholars have adopted a level-of-analysis perspective in studying this phenomenon. However, research has predominantly focused on cross-level effects of team-level factors, thereby neglecting factors residing at higher levels of analysis (e.g., societal) and alternative models integrating levels (e.g., multilevel and compositional models). Consistent with these limitations, scholars have converged around the need to address three unanswered levels-of-analysis questions: 1) Are relationships of trust with other variables homologous across levels of analysis? 2) How does societal-level culture shape lower-level relationships of trust with other variables? 3) How does trust consensus help clarify the way trust operates at the unit level? This paper aims to advance understanding of these issues through a meta-analytic examination. In line with our multilevel theorizing on homology, we find that trust-outcome relationships are different in magnitude across levels. Contrary to our situational strength prediction, our cross-level findings reveal that Cultural Tightness strengthens individual-level trust-outcome relationships. Finally, our compositional findings demonstrate that trust consensus promotes unit outcomes both directly and by moderating the impact of trust magnitude. Our study advances a multilevel understanding of trust and elaborates on current theories by revealing discontinuities in how trust operates and manifests across levels.