Understanding How Perceived Leader Integrity Affects Follower Trust: Lessons From the Use of Multidimensional Measures of Integrity and Trust

Abstract

Even though much research has emerged recently supporting the importance of perceived leader integrity judgments on how followers develop trust in their leaders, our efforts to understand possible mechanisms for these relationships have not yet yielded detailed explanations. One reason for this is that most research on perceived leader integrity and trust has used unidimensional measures of each construct, even though recent research has called for more complex treatments of them. The purpose of this study is to couple the use of a recently developed, multidimensional measure of perceived leader integrity with a multidimensional measure of trust to examine possible explanations of how they relate. Results support the value of modeling perceived integrity in two dimensions and support a more nuanced model of how integrity may affect trust when trust is similarly modeled as multiple dimensions. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of how leader integrity may affect trust and other outcomes.