Exploring the Effects of Agent Trust and Benevolence in a Simulated Organizational Task

Executives argue intuitively that trust is critical to e€ ective organizational performance. Although articulated as a cognitive/a€ ective property of individuals, the collective e€ ect of events inuencing (and being inuenced by) trust judgments must certainly impact organizational behavior. To begin to explore this, we conducted a simulation study of trust and organizational performance. SpeciŽcally, we deŽned a set of computational agents, each with a trust function capable of evaluating the quality of advice from the other agents, and rendering judgments on the trustworthiness of the communicating agent . As agent judgments impact subsequent choices to accept or to generate communications, organizational performance is inuenced.We manipulated two agent properties (trustworthiness, benevolence), two organizational variables (group size, group homogeneity/liar-to-honest ratio), and one environmental variable (stable, unstable). Results indicate that in homogeneous groups, honest groups did better than groups of liars, but under environmental instability , benevolent groups did worse. Under all conditions for heterogeneous groups, it only took one to three liars to degrade organizational performance.