Research Note: The Effects of Organizational Trust on the Work Attitudes of U.S. Social Workers

Abstract

Organizational trust includes both supervisor trust and management trust. Additionally, the three main work attitudes are job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. The objective of this study was to explore the effects of the two types of trust on the three work attitudes with data from a survey of 255 U.S. social workers. In multivariate ordinary least squares regression, the effects of the two forms of organizational trust varied across the three work attitudes. Only management trust had a significant positive effect on job involvement, while both forms of trust had positive relationships with job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. For job satisfaction, the effect sizes of both forms of trust were similar; however, for organizational commitment, management trust’s effect was far greater than the effects of supervisor trust. The current findings support the overall contention that supervisor and management trust play important roles in shaping social worker job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and they also underscore the need for improving perceptions of supervisor and management trust among social workers. Future longitudinal research will be able to demonstrate the causal process of the effects of trust on the three work attitudes.