The Importance of Trust in Manager-Employee Relationships

Trust is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon. Organizational trust is an important part of professional relationships between co-workers, between managers and employees, or between employees and managers. Trust can be either interpersonal or institutional in nature. To measure, understand, and explain trust in an organizational context, it is important to identify different dimensions of trust (competence, benevolence, and integrity), different types of trust (horizontal trust between co-workers, vertical trust between managers and employees, and vertical trust between employees and managers), and the roles that different dimensions of trust have in different types of trust. The aim of this paper is to determine the roles that the different dimensions of trust have in each of the different types of trust at Gaia, a Polish lingerie company. Study results show competence is the least important dimension of trust in all of the different types of trust at Gaia, the Polish lingerie company. Integrity is the most important dimension of trust in relationships between co-workers. Benevolence is the most important dimension of trust in relationships between employees and managers.