Trust violation at work: Lived experiences of American, Indian, and Chinese employees

Abstract

Despite decades of research establishing that trust is critical to successful collaboration, the experience of trust violation is poorly understood independent of trust repair. Furthermore, despite increasing globalization, most organizational research on trust violation is heavily Westernized. This semi-structured interview study explored subjective experiences of trust violation at work across 23 individuals from the United States, India, and China to better understand similarities and differences in the unfolding reactions to trust violations across cultures. Our inductive thematic analysis identifies some trust violation triggers common to all three nationalities (i.e., psychological contract breach, professional attack, lack of work ethic) and some triggers unique to certain nationalities (i.e., lack of acknowledgment for Indian workers; excessive monitoring and injustice perceptions for Chinese workers). Regarding reactions to trust violations, American workers emphasized a central reaction of anger, Indian workers described more varied emotional and behavioral reactions possibly reflecting cultural complexity, and Chinese workers described reactions of emotion suppression and behavioral avoidance that align with theories of face. For American and Indian workers, violations damaged both interpersonal relationships and attitudes towards one’s job, whereas for Chinese workers, violations damaged only the focal interpersonal relationship. We discuss the implications of our descriptive, nationality-specific unfolding models of trust violation for advancing cross-cultural research on trust violations at work.