Trust within Brazilian new economy organizations: an empirical investigation of gender effects benchmarked on Brazilian old economy organizations

Marco Tulio Zanini,Edward J Lusk,Birgitta Wolff

doi:10.1590/s1807-76922009000300005

Abstract

It has been suggested that one of the negative aspects of the New Economy has been growing organizational survival-risk both at the firm and the sector levels. This precarious positioning of the firm has profoundly changed the work environment resulting in the dissolution of job-definition-boundaries, thereby raising the intensity of work and finally affecting the level and nature of trust in the workplace. This is the starting point for our study. Using a questionnaire developed by Gillespie, we investigated gender profiles concerning trust in Supervisors, Peers, and Team in the New and the Old Economies for Brazilian managers. The results show that, for the New Economy, Brazilian women are more willing to give trust to Supervisors whereas Brazilian men expressed higher levels of trust when dealing with Team members. The Peer results are mixed. For the Old Economy, men uniformly express higher levels of trust compared to women over all three reference groups. Finally, for gender matched comparisons, those working in the Brazilian Old Economy firms express higher levels of trust compared to their counterparts in the New Economy independent of gender or time worked. We conclude by discussing the control implications of the above results.

Highlights

Ripperger (1998, p. 45) offers the following definition of trust: Trust is the voluntary risk investment in advance, in a relationship under the abdication of explicit safeguard mechanisms of control against opportunistic behavior, in the expectation that the other party, despite of the absence of such safeguards, will not behave opportunistically.This definition is the one that we will adopt for our investigation because, in this conceptualization, control is contingent on trust and trust, as we will argue, is in turn affected by uncertainty
The historical information on the Brazilian commercial milieu and the gender distributions represented in Tables 1 and 2, we offer the following hypotheses that are due principally to the assumed male-dominated traditions in the Old Economy coupled with its relative stability compared to the New Economy, where there is a relative gender-balance and a much higher degree of uncertainty: H1
Given that we have developed two hypotheses for the gender expression within the Old and the New Economies, consider the relationship between these institutional frameworks: H3: Controlling for gender, trust in the Old Economy will be uniformly greater than the trust expressed by those in the New Economy independent of the time worked in the organization

Summary

Introduction

Ripperger (1998, p. 45) offers the following definition of trust: Trust is the voluntary risk investment in advance, in a relationship under the abdication of explicit safeguard mechanisms of control against opportunistic behavior, in the expectation that the other party, despite of the absence of such safeguards, will not behave opportunistically.This definition is the one that we will adopt for our investigation because, in this conceptualization, control is contingent on trust and trust, as we will argue, is in turn affected by uncertainty. As Ripperger (1998) and Ring and Van de Ven (1994) suggest, that when high levels of trust characterise interpersonal interactions throughout the organization, the level of control needed through monitoring and the nature of sanctions for dysfunctional opportunistic behaviour will be lower and less severe respectively. The logic of their argument is that the existence of trust within the organization considerably expands the possibility for individuals to form positive cooperative relationships that mitigate against the opportunistic collusive behaviours that often compromise the charge that the organization comply with the laws and regulations relevant in its commercial milieu In the presence of such uncertainty, one expects that the level of trust will be lower and, requires a higher level of monitoring to control the anticipated opportunistic behaviour

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion