Future Trust Research Articles

Visualization of AI Accuracy: A Novel Assignment for the Teaching of Critical Thinking and Science Writing

Background Rapid changes brought on by generative artificial intelligence (AI) have emphasized the need to teach students to work with this technology while also developing the “robot proof” human skills future workers will need, such as creativity, communication, and critical thinking. Objective The study objective was to explore whether a fact-checking, generative-AI assignment, inserted between the outline, and first-draft stages of a student's literature review writing process, would relate to student classification, perceptions of AI accuracy, and future trust in AI-generated content. Method Students in upper and lower division psychology classes used AI to generate a literature review on their final paper topic, which they then fact-checked for accuracy and usefulness using a color-coded system. Results Lower division students expected more inaccuracy, highlighted less information as inaccurate, and reported greater future trust of AI-generated content than upper division students. Conclusion Students with more experience critically evaluating primary sources may be better equipped to detect inaccuracies within AI-generated content. Teaching Implications Teachers of any course requiring a literature review paper may use this assignment to encourage student use of AI with a critical eye toward recognizing where that content is incorrect.

Aantekeninge: Trustaktes en die risiko’s van ’n onnadenkende kopiëring van template

The formulations used in many deeds for a trust inter vivos are probably examples of the type of fallacy that accepts that because there are thousands if not millions of trust deeds for a trust inter vivos that have an identical preamble, they must be legally valid. In many of these trust deeds the preamble and first clause in essence reads: “TRUST DEED XYZ TRUST ENTERED INTO BETWEEN XYZ Identity Number 801023 4567 089 (hereinafter referred to as FOUNDER) and XYZ Identity Number 801023 4567 089 And ABC ID nr And DEF ID nr (hereinafter referred to as TRUSTEES) ON BEHALF OF: THE INCOME AND CAPITAL BENEFICIARIES AS DEFINED IN PARAGRAPH 1.2.1 OF THIS TRUST DEED WHEREAS the founder is desirous of creating the trust herein referred to for and on behalf of the aforementioned beneficiaries subject to the terms and conditions as hereinafter set forth in more detail. AND WHEREAS the trustees declared themselves willing to accept the donation and to hold and utilise it on behalf of the beneficiaries subject to the conditions as set forth by the founder and as it is recorded in this deed of trust; The founder hereby donates to the trustees the amount of R100 (One Hundred Rand) which immediately vests in the trustees in their official capacity to be held in trust and administered according to the terms of this deed. The current trustees are as scheduled in the preamble to this deed …” (emphasis added). In the example the agreement is seemingly concluded with itself by XYZ acting simultaneously as the founder and as primary trustee. However, it is an established legal and logical principle that a legal subject, with the possible exception of a recognised agency construction with an existing principal, cannot enter into an agreement with himself and that any attempt to establish such a construction is necessarily doomed to complete nullity. In the initial editions of LAWSA, this principle was repeated without qualification with regard to a representative construction: “a contract is a juristic act for which expressions of common intention by at least two persons are required”. The later qualification in the case law applies only to the said existing principal and agency arrangements. The envisaged future trust inter vivos can be established, however, at the earliest after all the parties involved have signed the document to express their agreement to the terms incorporated in the agreement. Until then, there is still no trust, and no one can “in an official capacity”, in the sense that Honoré argues that trusteeship is an “office”, represent the non-existent trust. Where a person seeks to conclude an alleged agreement with himself, the law attaches as little value to it as to an arbitrary New Year’s resolution – no legal consequences flow from it. Such an “agreement” is ab initio void and without any legal consequences. Void agreements cannot later be rectified. This is not to be confused with an incorrectly recorded agreement where any of the parties to the existing agreement is entitled to rely on their real consensus and to have the document formally corrected to express their true common intention. Apparently, the trust deed in the example of the XYZ Trust above is void from the outset regardless of whether or not the master of the high court officially registered it later. The administrative act of registration by the master cannot amend the legal position and breathe legal life into a void document. It is submitted that there is an easy way out of the self-caused “practice crisis” where the naïve use of the trusted template of the trust deeds unintentionally jeopardises the validity of these trusts because of the unnecessary cloning of the founder as primary trustee. The trusted template should be amended so that the founder does not allegedly contract with himself as trustee but merely enters into the agreement with the other two persons identified as the original trustees of the XYZ Trust. In order to give effect where applicable to the interest of the founder to retain as a trustee (albeit effectively as one of the controlling trustees) say in the execution of “his” trust, a simple additional conditional clause may provide for a resolutive condition that applies if the other two trustees with whom he as founder initially signed the trust deed do not enter into an agreement with him within the prescribed period in order to add him as an additional trustee on his acceptance of all the controlling powers provided for in the deed. The template often provides for the later appointment of additional trustees: “The current trustees are as scheduled in the preamble to this deed … but the trustees are entitled to appoint additional trustees of their own choice … .”

The Legacies of Rebel Rule in Southeast Turkey

During armed conflict civilians often inhabit areas of contested governance or areas where rebel groups, NGOs, and/or criminal syndicates vie for authority and challenge the control of the state. As non-state actors confront the authority and legitimacy of the state, civilians become central players in that competition asked to uphold or undercut these alternative governance claims. In this paper we examine the long-term impact of rebel governance for citizens living in spaces where state governance is challenged. Leveraging survey data from areas historically under PKK control in Southeastern Turkey, we focus on the ways in which contestation over governance during the conflict influenced future trust and engagement with the Turkish state. Specifically, we find that individual engagement with rebel governance institutions and personal conflict experience are important factors in understanding the effects of contested governance. Our findings increase our understanding of the long-term impact of armed conflict on civilians and the potential lasting impacts of rebel governance on the post-conflict state.

Investigating multidimensional organisational trust through breach

ABSTRACT Objective The literature shows employee trust in leaders supports organisational performance, despite much still being unknown about the employee-leader trust relationship. This study aimed to explore employee trust in leaders through trust breaches to broaden knowledge about the multidimensional nature of the trust construct and provide organisations with a focus on how to improve employee trust in leaders. Method Trust breaches were explored using hypothetical vignettes. Participants received one scenario with a combination of a relationship treatment and behavioural treatment. There were three relationship treatments: no relationship, new relationship, and established relationship between employee and leader. There were also eight unique behavioural treatments of trust breach between employee and leader in the workplace (for example, betraying agreements). Results Using one-way and two-way analysis of variance, findings showed that only those allocated to the established relationship group were likely to trust the hypothetical leader in the future. While all behavioural breaches negatively influenced future trust, the behaviours of leader lying to, betraying confidentiality of, and publicly belittling the employee were significantly less likely to engender future employee trust. Conclusion This study offers a novel perspective to exploring employee-leader multidimensional organisational trust by investigating trust breaches according to type of relationship and behavioural breach type. This study showed behavioural breaches negatively influence perceptions of future employee trust in leaders. It also reaffirms that established relationships are most likely to be resilient to trust breaches over nominal or absent relationships between employees and their leader.

A Systematic Review of Using Deep Learning Technology in the Steady-State Visually Evoked Potential-Based Brain-Computer Interface Applications: Current Trends and Future Trust Methodology.

The significance of deep learning techniques in relation to steady-state visually evoked potential- (SSVEP-) based brain-computer interface (BCI) applications is assessed through a systematic review. Three reliable databases, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and IEEE, were considered to gather relevant scientific and theoretical articles. Initially, 125 papers were found between 2010 and 2021 related to this integrated research field. After the filtering process, only 30 articles were identified and classified into five categories based on their type of deep learning methods. The first category, convolutional neural network (CNN), accounts for 70% (n = 21/30). The second category, recurrent neural network (RNN), accounts for 10% (n = 3/30). The third and fourth categories, deep neural network (DNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM), account for 6% (n = 30). The fifth category, restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), accounts for 3% (n = 1/30). The literature's findings in terms of the main aspects identified in existing applications of deep learning pattern recognition techniques in SSVEP-based BCI, such as feature extraction, classification, activation functions, validation methods, and achieved classification accuracies, are examined. A comprehensive mapping analysis was also conducted, which identified six categories. Current challenges of ensuring trustworthy deep learning in SSVEP-based BCI applications were discussed, and recommendations were provided to researchers and developers. The study critically reviews the current unsolved issues of SSVEP-based BCI applications in terms of development challenges based on deep learning techniques and selection challenges based on multicriteria decision-making (MCDM). A trust proposal solution is presented with three methodology phases for evaluating and benchmarking SSVEP-based BCI applications using fuzzy decision-making techniques. Valuable insights and recommendations for researchers and developers in the SSVEP-based BCI and deep learning are provided.

Artificial Intelligence You Can Trust: What Matters Beyond Performance When Applying Artificial Intelligence to Renal Histopathology?

Although still in its infancy, artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of kidney biopsy images is anticipated to become an integral aspect of renal histopathology. As these systems are developed, the focus will understandably be on developing ever more accurate models, but successful translation to the clinic will also depend upon other characteristics of the system.In the extreme, deployment of highly performant but "black box" AI is fraught with risk, and high-profile errors could damage future trust in the technology. Furthermore, a major factor determining whether new systems are adopted in clinical settings is whether they are "trusted" by clinicians. Key to unlocking trust will be designing platforms optimized for intuitive human-AI interactions and ensuring that, where judgment is required to resolve ambiguous areas of assessment, the workings of the AI image classifier are understandable to the human observer. Therefore, determining the optimal design for AI systems depends on factors beyond performance, with considerations of goals, interpretability, and safety constraining many design and engineering choices.In this article, we explore challenges that arise in the application of AI to renal histopathology, and consider areas where choices around model architecture, training strategy, and workflow design may be influenced by factors beyond the final performance metrics of the system.

ELECTRONIC WORD OF MOUTH AND CONSUMER TRUST ON PURCHASE INTEREST

Introduction: The spread of Covid-19 requires all activities to be carried out completely online, including shopping activities that utilize the marketplace, one of which is Bukalapak. This study is useful in knowing the influence of E-WOM and consumer confidence in purchase interest in the Bukalapak marketplace. Methods: This study uses a quantitative approach. The study population is visitors of Bukalapak marketplace from Surabaya. The sampling technique used non-probability sampling and the respondent sampling technique through accidental sampling, in order to obtain 77 respondents. Information collection is done by distributing questionnaires to respondents using Google Forms with a Likert scale from a score range of 1 to 5. Then the data is processed using Partial Least Square (PLS) data analysis techniques using validity tests, reliability tests, structural model tests and hypothesis testing. Results The results of the study show that E-WOM and consumer trust have a positive and significant influence on buyer interest in the Bukalapak marketplace. This means that E-WOM and consumer confidence contribute to the purchase interest of visitors in the Bukalapak Marketplace in Surabaya. Conclusion and suggestion: This study is conducted to build interest in buying as measured by electronic word of mouth and consumer trust in Bukalapak, it is hoped that sellers in Bukalapak will pay more attention to every comment and review that comes in and then give a good response so that in the future trust and buying interest from other consumers will increase. Thus, Bukalapak can develop its marketing strategy based on the results of this study, so that it becomes a marketplace that consumers always rely on.

Hope in the uncertainties and certainty for parents of children with rare neurological disorders: Part 2 (of 3): Certainty.

This is the second of a three-part series that explores different aspects of uncertainty, certainty and hope in the context of providing clinical care for children with rare and life-limiting neurological disorders. When caring for families impacted by an overwhelming complex disorder in a child, complicated by threatening uncertainties and potentially more threatening certainties, clinicians utilise skills drawn from differing fields to make the load of information, and the emotional impact more manageable. The first article in this series addressed how clinicians might manage the 'accumulation of uncertainties' and to provide compassionate care not only to their patients, and their families, but also to themselves. This second paper delves into the less helpful aspects of 'certainty', including the associated losses and griefs endured by parents responding to threatening fears associated with their child's condition. In the extreme, disconnection and psychological isolation borne by parents can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. Facing unwelcome certainties - clinicians and parents together - forms the basis of future trust and hope. Clinicians who share the field of trust with families and show commitment to helping parents, even when cure remains elusive, build a sense of hope. This is the sort of hopefulness that clinicians need to have and to offer as they share the journey with families. In this series, we seek to harness a shared approach to face unwelcome certainties and to kindle a sense of hope that is both credible and meaningful to the parents, family and clinician.

Knowledge Spillover through Blockchain Network in Tourism: Development and Validation of Tblock Questionnaire

With the advent of disruptive technologies, blockchain is considered to be the most prominent technology that has the potential to have a significant influence on the knowledge management field, particularly knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer and knowledge spillover. This paper outlines the development and validation of the Knowledge Spillover through Tourism Blockchain Questionnaire, the TBlockQ. The purpose of this questionnaire is to acknowledge the key factors aligned with the level of knowledge spillover generated within a blockchain network. The TBlockQ was a synthesis of 29 5-point Likert scaled questions. A total of 422 correspondents participated in this study. The results of this study outline the reliability and validation of this questionnaire. The reliability statistics of all the items are high. Three factors, revealed from the factor analysis, identifying the knowledge spillover from a blockchain network in the tourism industry were: (a) networking expansion, improvement and spillover intention, (b) entrepreneurial and future prospects and (c) trust and security.

Trust Management in Social Internet of Things (SIoT): A Survey

A survey on trust management in the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is provided, beginning with a discussion of SIoT architectures and relationships. Using a variety of publication databases, we describe efforts that focus on various trust management aspects of SIoT. Trust management models comprise three themes: trust computation, aggregation, and updates. Our study presents a detailed discussion of all three steps. Trust computation and trust aggregation depend upon Trust Attributes (TAs) for the calculation of local and global trust values. Our paper discusses many strategies for aggregating trust, but “Weighted Sum” is the most frequently used in the relevant studies. Our paper addresses trust computation and aggregation scenarios. Our work classifies research by TAs (Social Trust, Quality of Service). We’ve categorized the research (reputation-based, recommendation-based, knowledge-based) depending on the types of feedback/opinions used to calculate trust values (global feedback/opinion, feedback from a friend, trustor’s own opinion considering the trustee’s information). Our work classifies studies (policy-based, prediction-based, weighted sum-based/weighted linear combination-based) by trust computation/aggregation approach. Two trust-update schemes are discussed: time-driven and event-driven schemes, while most trust management models utilize an event-driven scheme. Both trust computation and aggregation need propagating trust values in a centralized, decentralized, or semi-centralized way. Our study covers classifying research by trust updates and propagation techniques. Trust models should provide resiliency to SIoT attacks. This analysis classifies SIoT attacks as collaborative or individual. We also discuss scenarios depicted in the relevant studies to incorporate resistance against trust-related attacks in SIoT. Studies suggest context-based or context-free trust management strategies. Our study categorizes studies based on context-based or context-free approaches. To gain the benefits of an immutable, privacy-preserving approach, a future trust management system should utilize Blockchain technology to support non-repudiation and tracking of trust relationships.

Ecological dimensions explain the past but do not predict future changes in trust.

Concerns about declining trust and rising cynicism are recurrent in academic research and the media. Yet, prior studies focused on explaining, rather than predicting, temporal changes in trust. We tested prediction models of trust change across (up to) 98 countries over six measurement waves (from 1981 to 2014). We tested whether different ecological predictors (e.g., pathogen prevalence, population diversity, inequality) explain the past and predict future trust levels across countries. We used societal growth curve models to disentangle between- from within-country effects and evaluated the accuracy of the models' out-of-sample predictions using the train-test split method: We used data from 1981-2009 to "train" the models and obtain predictions of trust for the period of 2010-2014. None of our models was more accurate in predicting future trust than a simpler baseline model. Moreover, we did not observe a universal decline in trust. Instead, temporal changes in trust were country-specific, highlighting the locality of cultural change. Most ecological predictors were correlated with between-country differences in trust. Only resource availability and moral opinion polarization were associated with within-country changes in trust: Countries that became less wealthy and more morally polarized over time also became less trustful. These results highlight important differences between explanatory and predictive models and suggest that ecological theories of trust might be of limited use when predicting future cultural shifts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

What can the experiences of young adult carers tell us about what can make services more helpful for them and their families?

ABSTRACT Young adults who provide unpaid care for older relatives have poorer outcomes than their peers in education, employment, health and wellbeing. Services that can potentially have a positive impact on their lives include services provided to the person they care for. However, survey research in England has indicated that receipt of such services is not necessarily linked to fewer negative consequences for young adult carers. We conducted in-depth interviews with fourteen young adult carers who had responded to the original survey. We explored their experiences with services for the care recipient and what factors limit or enhance the usefulness of those services. We found three interrelated themes. First, difficulties accessing services can add to stress, and make problems harder to address when services are implemented; second, lack of continuity of services, and practitioners, undermines relationships and future trust in services, whereas consistent relationships are beneficial. Third, young adult carers described the benefits that resulted from their being involved in discussions and decisions about services, and the problems when this does not happen. The wellbeing of the young adult carer and the person receiving care are shown to be inextricably interrelated; we draw out implications for efforts to improve services.

Improved Trust Establishment Performance with Transaction-based Preprocessing

In Multi-Agent Systems, trustees can utilize trust establishment models to help improve their trust with trustors in the environment. This improved trust helps to improve the quality of interactions in the environment and increases the viability of a trustee as an interaction partner. To help current and future trust establishment models become more modular to adapt to changes brought by future research and to introduce a method to allow for improved performance, a generalized trust establishment model architecture is presented. The proposed Generalized Trust Establishment Model is a simplistic model which illustrates how the generalized architecture can be used to design a competent trust establishment model. This model uses the architecture’s newly proposed transaction-level preprocessing module to achieve strong simulation results. This preprocessing module allows a model to fine-tune the amount of resources that will be given to trustors before the transactions occur to help more accurately meet the needs of trustors. Using the preprocessing module, the proposed model better meets a trustor’s needs and achieves a higher average trust in the environment faster than when the pre- processing is not performed. This exhibits that preprocessing is an important technique that can be used by any trust establishment model to improve the models performance.

Employee trust repair after organizational change

PurposeThis study examines the trust-repair practices after organizational change.Design/methodology/approachPrevious research on this topic is limited, so an abductive qualitative research approach was adopted. The data were collected from key informants through focus group discussions and interviews.FindingsBeyond previous research findings, this study identified that employee trust can be repaired after benevolence-based trust violations by enforcing ethical behavior and fostering managers' emotional intelligence and after competence-based violations by fostering the sense-making process and by involving third parties in trust recovery. In addition, transparent information sharing and strong management actions predict positive trust outcomes in a change context.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper makes three key contributions to the literature on organizational trust by (1) identifying trust violations after organizational change, (2) proposing a process model on trust repair and (3) extending understanding of trust repair practices by revealing new elements.Practical implicationsThis study provides practical information from a real work context and can improve managers' understanding of active trust-repair practices.Originality/valueThis paper outlines active trust-repair practices in an organizational change context and expands the current theory by presenting novel insights into organizational trust repair. In addition, this paper contributes to the trust-repair literature by proposing promising avenues for future trust repair research.

Beneficial Effects of Biochar on Agriculture and Environments

Crop residue management becomes the challenging issue to farmers for balancing between the economic and sustainable environment. Though burning is the easiest way of destroying the crop waste it not only causes drastic changes in green house gas but also large amount of nutrients are removed from soil by plants. Hence the technique which protects the environment along with enhancing soil quality is needed. Therefore pyrolysis of crop residue can become an alternate technique against past strategies. The heterogeneous characteristics of the biochar can be produced through the pyrolysis process and that would be employed as a soil amendment. The biochar application ameliorates the problems which persist in soil and enhance the crop production in environmentally sound way. And largely involved in the carbon sequestration thereby sustain the soil quality. However there is lack of information available on effects of long term application of biochar and durability of persistence in soil. Thus in those things made to review on brief account of biochar such as, biochar production, characteristics, impacts on soil properties, crop growth, reduction of green house gases and heavy metal remediation. Moreover, in this review discusses about what are all the challenges and future trust in the application of biochar. So, the deep understanding on biochar and its interaction with soil can bridge the gap prevailed in the scientific field and crop improvement.

Thai Trust Law: A Legal Import Rooted in Pragmatism

The Thai Civil and Commercial Code expressly prohibits the creation of trusts except when provided for by specific legislation. To date, there is only one such piece of legislation: the Trust for Transactions in the Capital Market Act of 2007. However, the history of trusts in Thailand dates back to the late 19th century, and whilst the separation of legal and equitable titles does not sit well with the Code’s legal or intellectual framework, it is possible to provide a coherent explanation of its historical development through the lens of legal pragmatism. This chapter investigates the journey of trust law in Thailand, which runs in parallel with the country’s expansion of international trade and its industrial modernisation. It traces the historical judicial treatment of English common law trusts and the more modern regulatory attempt to integrate statutory trusts into the Thai legal system. Whilst both avenues demonstrate a highly adaptive and pragmatic approach to this imported equitable creature, they appeal to different legal and public policy considerations. With the Draft Bill on Trusts for the Purpose of Personal Asset Management having received cabinet approval in 2018, Thailand now stands at an important juncture for the development of its future trust law regime.

Neural representations of honesty predict future trust behavior

Theoretical accounts propose honesty as a central determinant of trustworthiness impressions and trusting behavior. However, behavioral and neural evidence on the relationships between honesty and trust is missing. Here, combining a novel paradigm that successfully induces trustworthiness impressions with functional MRI and multivariate analyses, we demonstrate that honesty-based trustworthiness is represented in the posterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and intraparietal sulcus. Crucially, brain signals in these regions predict individual trust in a subsequent social interaction with the same partner. Honesty recruited the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), and stronger functional connectivity between the VMPFC and temporoparietal junction during honesty encoding was associated with higher trust in the subsequent interaction. These results suggest that honesty signals in the VMPFC are integrated into trustworthiness beliefs to inform present and future social behaviors. These findings improve our understanding of the neural representations of an individual’s social character that guide behaviors during interpersonal interactions.

The Russian Intelligentsia and Russia’s Social Institutions: Trust or Alienation

ABSTRACT This article considers the institutional trust of Russia’s humanitarian intelligentsia, describes its underlying qualities, characterizes the structure of institutional trust, reveals the essence and prerequisites of its occurrence, and analyzes the elements of institutional structure. The intelligentsia demonstrates a very high level of trust in the Russian president, but the attitudes and motives of this trust differ significantly (the difference between true supporters and passive observers). Trust in the military reflects the intelligentsia’s recognition of its merits and role in ensuring the security of the state. Complete trust in the church indicates the intelligentsia’s identification with its values and goals. The intelligentsia’s low level of trust in political institutions is part of a contemporary international trend—a sense of injustice, the belief that things will not improve, and incredulity about the future undermine trust in the state. Trust of the police and the courts is low, largely due to widespread prejudice, low awareness of their activities, and rare interactions with them. The intelligentsia’s trust in television and the press is very limited; however, television remains the main source of news, while an important alternative is the Internet. The low level of institutional trust among members of the humanitarian intelligentsia is combined with conservatism, paternalism, and civic and political passivity, and is more likely an indication of disappointment and alienation than an active criticism of Russian institutions.

Trust Models in Grid Computing: A Review

Background:Grid computing relates to a pool of resources to be shared by users in Grid Environment. Security of the resources from users and vice-versa is a significant issue. This is where the notion of trust comes into existence. A number of researchers have proposed models for evaluation of trust in grid computing, but they fail to spot one or the other parameters for trust evaluation. The essence of trust models in grid computing is that they offer autonomic trust management. An autonomic trust model has been patented by Z. Yan and C. Prehofer in 2009. Another patent was published by Anna University in 2010 to evaluate the trustworthiness of a resource provider in Grid environment.Objective:This paper firstly focuses and illustrates these essential parameters. Based on these parameters, further, a comparison of some existing models for trust evaluation is shown. Finally, common parameters missed out by various models have been highlighted giving way for improvements of Trust model.Methods:A Trust evaluation model has been proposed by us previously based on a number of real-world trust evaluation parameters. This model sees trust as a three-dimensional entity. Trust is based on Dempter Shafer’s theory in which trust is calculated mathematically.Results:Software trust needs to be calculated mathematically. There are a large number of real-world parameters that need to be included for evaluating trust.Conclusion:As trust models in research are based on simulation techniques, so it is important to include real-world factors that affect trust value of one entity on other. Some of those parameters, missed by most of the models have been identified for inclusion in future trust models.

THE IMPACT OF TRUST ON LEADERSHIP DURING MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS: CASE STUDIES FROM THE INDIAN TELECOM SECTOR

Managing employees’ trust on the organization, during mergers and acquisitions is definitely a critical leadership challenge in today’s global environment. Prior leadership research has been an evidence of how a leader communicates during a downsizing event with the employees who would be expected to feel more vulnerable can create the foundation for future trust in the leader. (Kasper-Feuhre and Ashkanasy, 2001). This paper explores the dynamics of trust during post-merger and acquisition integration planning in the Indian Telecom Sector. This study is purely doctrinal in nature, focusing on secondary sources which helps in examining major mergers in the telecom Industry in India namely Vodafone-Hutchison Essar Merger in 2007, Idea and Spice Telecom merger in 2008, Reliance Industries and Infotel merger in 2010, Vodafone and Idea Merger, Bharti Airtel and Telenor Merger, Tata Teleservices and Bharti Airtel merger.  The objective behind the study of these mergers is to understand the cultural disparity in the organizations and the leadership role in the cultural amalgamation of the participating companies for retaining the employees. Further this paper attempts to understand the role of trust in the organization as well as on the leader, post the merger when the employees are already experiencing a level of estrangement. The significance of analysing these perspectives in the above mentioned specific cases is to bring out the factors responsible for successful mergers and the consequences of failed mergers from a human resource perspective.&nbsp