Introduction: trust within organisations

Introduces six empirical studies on trust within organisations which were originally presented at a workshop on “Trust within and between organisations”, organised by the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management at the Free University Amsterdam, in November 2001. Areas covered include: the legitimacy of the field of study; common understandings and disagreements in theoretical ideas; and directions for future research. In the past decade, issues of trust in interand intra-organisational relationships have been increasing in importance on the agendas of organisational scholars, legitimated by changes in the social structure of societies, economic exchange relations and organisational forms. Given the diminishing binding power of reciprocal obligations (Kramer, 1996), of hierarchical relations (Sheppard and Tuschinsky, 1996) and of social institutions relying on hierarchy to sanction deviant behaviour (De Swaan, 1990) other mechanisms are needed to keep the social fabric of society intact. Due to processes of globalisation, flexibilisation of labour relations, continuous change and virtualisation of organisational forms, relations between people have become looser and behaviours are less easy to monitor nowadays. Within firms, lateral relationships and alliances are growing in importance, in contrast to hierarchical relationships that used to dominate the framing of work relations (Sheppard and Tuschinsky, 1996). Between firms, new linkages are being formed to achieve and maintain competitive advantage in the marketplace. These linkages require organisations to move towards network forms and alliances (Lewicki and Bunker, 1996). Besides, organisational performance becomes increasingly dependent on behaviours such as scanning the environment to explore opportunities, participation in organisational learning processes and helping colleagues to improve their performance. While cooperative behaviours are growing in importance, hierarchy can be less relied upon to bring these behaviours about (Kramer, 1996). Trustful relations between organisational members can promote voluntary cooperation and extra-role behaviours, as the study by Tyler in this volume shows. Increasing instances of organisational change have also contributed to the rise of trust on the research agenda. Conditions of change heighten the relevance of trust to organisational performance and to the well-being of organisational members (Mishra, 1996; Gilkey, 1991). Introduction