Organizational Trust, Learning Capability and Performance: an Empirical Study

Over the last few years, research on trust within organizations has been becoming increasingly important. Despite the fact that the majority of studies have suggested that it is beneficial for organizational performance, some empirical evidence has generated contradictory results concerning these variables. For this reason, this research attempts to look in depth at the relationships between trust and organizational performance, using organizational learning capability as an explanatory mediator variable. To confirm the hypotheses, the structural equation technique has been used on data from a survey carried out with the Spanish companies most highly rated by workers. The results obtained show that learning capability mediates in the relationship between trust and organizational performance, in which trust positively affects organizational learning capability and this, in turn, is positively related to organizational performance. Acknowledgments: The authors thank the Bancaja-UJI and the Spanish Innovation Ministry Programmes (Ref. P11B2008-13 and ECO2011-26780) for their financial support for this research.