Donald L. Ferrin

Singapore Management University | smu · Lee Kong Chian School of Business

Trust between organizations has been recognized as crucial in international business (IB) and has attracted extensive research attention. Researchers have conceptualized and measured interorganizational trust in multiple ways, investigated numerous determinants and outcomes of interorganizational trust, and explored interorganizational trust in sev...

CEO transgressions are a common storyline in today's business press. Such incidents result in the need to repair trust for both the CEO and the organisation that the CEO leads. Existing empirical research on trust repair has focused primarily on interpersonal trust, resulting in a body of knowledge that provides many insights to the errant CEO but...

Given the practical importance of interpersonal trust in dyadic negotiations, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the study of determinants of trust in negotiations. However, research in this area has not been well connected or integrated, which limits the ability of scholars and practitioners to ascertain the state of current scie...

In this interview, Dr Robert F. Hurley shares his own professional journey through the worlds of scientific research on trust and the practical application of trust research. Dr Hurley also shares his views on the nature, magnitude, and causes of the science-practice gap, and he discusses how practitioners and scholars might fruitfully bridge the g...

Behavioral integrity (BI) is the perception that another party lives by his or her word – keeps promises and enacts espoused values, or aligns words and actions (Simons, 2002). Substantial empirical research has linked leader behavioral integrity to follower attitudinal, behavioral, and performance outcomes (reviewed by Simons, Tomlinson & Leroy, 2...

Trust is essential for effective personal and professional relationships, and a substantial literature has studied the antecedents and consequences of trust. Most of this research has adopted a shared definition of trust: the willingness to be vulnerable based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another (Davis, Mayer, & Scho...

Trust has long been recognized by scholars and practitioners alike as an important factor for negotiation success. However, there has been little effort to date to empirically review or theoretically synthesize the research on trust in the context of negotiations. We present a social exchange framework that describes the processes through which tru...

Hong Kong Disneyland, a joint venture between the Walt Disney Company and the Hong Kong government, was conceived during the Asian financial crisis as a strategy for making Hong Kong a major tourist destination and providing Disney with a foothold into the potentially lucrative China market. Unfortunately, the park steadily lost money since opening...

In this Commentary, I review the progress made by trust scholars toward institutionalising trust research and practice, and also where progress has lagged. I compare the institutionalisation of the trust field to institutionalisation in the leadership, and negotiation & conflict management, fields. I consider factors such as the scale and scope of...

The Leading Question • How can companies recover from trust failures and create sustainable reputations for trustworthiness? Findings • Trust failures occur because of faults in the organization’s system rather than rogue employees and bad apples. • A common cause of trust failures is a company strategy or culture that serves the interests of one s...

This study incorporates insights from research on group decision-making and trust repair to investigate the differences that arise when alleged transgressors attempt to regain the trust of groups as compared to individuals. Results indicate that repairing trust is generally more difficult with groups than individuals, and both groups and individual...

Does trust and its development, functions and meaning, differ between people from different national–societal cultures? There is considerable anecdotal evidence and some theoretical argumentation to suggest it does, but are these supported by empirical research? This chapter reviews the available empirical evidence on the effects of national–societ...

Do the determinants of trust differ between people from different national-societal cultures? There is considerable anecdotal evidence and some theoretical argumentation to suggest they do, but are these supported by empirical research? This paper reviews the available empirical evidence on the effects of national-societal culture on the developmen...

Trust and satisfaction are essential ingredients for successful business relationships in business-to- consumer electronic commerce. Yet there is little research on trust and satisfaction in e-commerce that takes a longitudinal approach. Drawing on three primary bodies of literature, the theory of reasoned action, the extended valence framework, an...

We present three spiral reinforcement models that describe how mutual perceptions of trustworthiness and/or mutual cooperation may develop in dyadic interpersonal and intergroup relationships: a perceived trustworthiness spiral model, a cooperation spiral model, and a perceived trustworthiness-cooperation spiral model that posits a relatively more...

Are trust and risk important in consumers' electronic commerce purchasing decisions? What are the antecedents of trust and risk in this context? How do trust and risk affect an Internet consumer's purchasing decision? To answer these questions, we i) develop a theoretical framework describing the trust-based decision-making process a consumer uses...

Drawing on the diverse literatures of game theory, negotiation, interpersonal trust, and interorganizational relationships, the authors develop a theoretical model of the relationships among trust, monitoring, and cooperation in interpersonal and intergroup interactions. They use the concept of isomorphism as a basis for developing this theory, obs...

Prior research on responses to trust violations has focused primarily on the effects of apology and denial. The authors extended this research by studying another type of verbal response that is often used to respond to trust violations but has not been considered in the trust literature: reticence. An accused party may use reticence in a sincere a...

Past studies of the determinants of interpersonal trust have focused primarily on how trust forms in isolated dyads. Yet within organizations, trust typically develops between individuals who are embedded in a complex web of existing and potential relationships. In this article, the authors identify 3 alternative ways in which a trustor and trustee...

This study examines the trust repair implications of apologizing with an internal vs. external attribution after a competence- vs. integrity-based trust violation. By considering theory regarding differences in the perceived diagnosticity of information about competence vs. integrity, we note that the conditions where external attributions would be...

Prior research on trust repair has focused primarily on the effects of apology and denial. We recognize another form of verbal response: reticence. Although reticence is sometimes used for strategic reasons (e.g., to unjustifiably evade culpability), reticence is also used in many situations because it is more appropriate than apology and denial. B...

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the implications of 'substantive' responses for the repair of trust following a violation and the cognitive processes that govern how and when they are effective. These studies examined two forms of substantive responses, penance and regulation, that represent different categories of trust repair attem...

Two studies were conducted to examine the implications of an apology versus a denial for repairing trust after an alleged violation. Results reveal that trust was repaired more successfully when mistrusted parties (a) apologized for violations concerning matters of competence but denied culpability for violations concerning matters of integrity, an...

This article presents a theoretical framework that identifies three aspects of a socialrelationship that are critical determinants of interpersonal trust, and examinesthe differentiated roles that these three aspects of a social relationship play in trustdevelopment. The study moves beyond the study of unidirectional trust formation in dyadic inter...

Hypotheses asserting that reward structures - an omnipresent element of the work context - have a strong influence on interpersonal trust are tested, and the cognitive and behavioral routes through which the effects may occur are explored. Specifically, attribution theory is used to identify several core processes including social perception, self-...

There is little research on trust and satisfaction in the electronic commerce from a longitudinal (pre- and postpurchase) perspective. Based on previous frameworks and theories, this study developed a combined model of consumer trust and satisfaction in the context of Internet shopping. From the valance framework and expectation-confirmation theory...

This study proposes a framework regarding the relationship between consumer trust, satisfaction, and expectation in the context of electronic commerce. In particular, the framework draws together two theories: expectation-confirmation theory and social exchange theory. Following the longitudinal pre-purchase and post-purchase stages, this study pro...

In this study, the authors examined the findings and implications of the research on trust in leadership that has been conducted during the past 4 decades. First, the study provides estimates of the primary relationships between trust in leadership and key outcomes, antecedents, and correlates (k = 106). Second, the study explores how specifying th...

In this study, the authors examined the findings and implications of the research on trust in leadership that has been conducted during the past 4 decades. First, the study provides estimates of the primary relationships between trust in leadership and key outcomes, antecedents, and correlates (k = 106). Second, the study explores how specifying th...

Numerous researchers from various disciplines seem to agree that trust has a number of important benefits for organizations, although they have not necessarily come to agreement on how these benefits occur. In this article, 2 fundamentally different models that describe how trust might have positive effects on attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, and...

Intergroup negotiations, including manager/employee relations, joint ventures, and corporate budgeting processes among others, are an important element of organizational life. Social dilemma theory and transaction cost economics both recognize the simultaneous presence of competitive and cooperative motives in such situations, and recognize the imp...

The idea that trust in leadership has an important effect on employeeperformance, behavior, and attitudes has been recognized across numerous literatures and disciplines. In this paper, we amass and summarize findings of empirical research from the past several decades on the consequences of trust inleadership. We conducted a meta-analysis of 47 sa...

Most of the research on trust rests on, or is intended to examine, the following proposition: interpersonal trust exerts positive effects on interpersonal behavior and work group performance. We examine the proposition's validity by reviewing existing research. Finding limited support, we present several alternative roles for trust in organizationa...