The national culture effect: Trust at Saudi Arabian petrochemical engineering firms

Abstract

Trust and national culture are important factors in organisational performance and the relationship between the two needs to be fully understood. The paper reports a study of engineering managers and employees working in Saudi Arabia and of both Saudi and non-Saudi nationality. Two survey instruments, Modified McAllister's cognitive and affective trust scale and Organisational Trust Inventory (OTI), are used to assess the level of trust in the immediate supervisor, CEO and organisation in engineering managers and employees. Two subgroups, high collectivist and high individualist respondents are then analysed. Parametric statistics are applied with a T-test analysis used to assesses whether the means of the two groups are statistically different from each other. The paper finds that there is a significant difference between high collectivist and high individualist engineering managers and employees for all three of the referents, trust in supervisor, trust in CEO and trust in organization. In each case engineers from a high collectivist culture report a higher trust perception.