The significance of direct-leader and co-worker trust on turnover intentions: A cross-cultural study

Abstract

This study examines the relative strength of the relationships of an employee's affect-based and cognition-based trust of their direct leader and co-workers to the employee's turnover intentions in four countries. Surveys were completed by 554 participants; the sample consisted of 81 Russians, 113 Poles, 155 Americans and 205 Turks. It was found that the employee's affect-based trust of their direct leader was more strongly associated (negatively) with turnover intentions than was the employee's affect-based trust of their co-workers for our combined international sample; however, the association of cognition-based trust of the direct leader and cognition-based trust of their co-workers to turnover intentions did not differ. This study looked at the moderating effect of culture. We found that in-group collectivism moderated the relationship of both affect-based trust of co-workers and cognition-based trust of co-workers to turnover intentions.

Keywords:

• direct leader trust
• co-worker trust
• turnover intentions
• in-group collectivism

Notes on contributors

Robert Costigan received his PhD in applied psychology from the University of Missouri – St. Louis and holds an MBA from Washington University. He is currently a Professor of Management at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York. His research interests include international human resource management, interpersonal trust and business education.

Richard Insinga received his doctorate in management from Pace University. He was educated in Engineering at Columbia University and Business at Stanford University. He spent 25 years in industry, consulting and government. He was director of strategic planning at the corporate research centre of United Technologies and corporate director of technology at Avco, both diversified aerospace companies. He is emeritus from the State University of New York. His research interests include international studies of organisational behavior.

J. Jason Berman is Professor of Management and Associate Dean of the St. John Fisher College School of Business. Dr. Berman teaches leadership classes in the MBA and undergraduate business programmes, and serves as an OD consultant. His research interests focus around the formation of interpersonal trust and the role of leadership in overcoming obstacles to individual and organisational learning.

Grazyna Kranas received her PhD from the University of Warsaw, Department of Psychology. She was a visiting assistant professor in the Stockholm School of Economics and a visiting researcher in the European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management in Brussels. She was a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at University of Warsaw and the head of Laboratory of Psychology of Organization and Work. Her current research interests include managerial skills, organisational culture and factors affecting self-evaluations in business (especially female self-evaluations).

Vladimir Kureshov graduated from the Krasnoyarsk Polytechnic Institute and received his Candidate of Science degree from the Moscow Machine Tools Institute. He was Deputy Chief of the Department of Science and Education of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Committee. Since 1990, he has been the vice-rector for International Cooperation and a professor of the International Business Department at the Siberian State Aerospace University. He coordinated several international projects for higher education with universities from Europe and the US. His current research interests include international business and international integration of higher education.

Notes

1. In-group collectivism is one of nine cultural dimensions that was conceptually and operationally defined and then measured in the 1990s across 62 nations in the GLOBE Project (Dorfman, Javidan, Hanges, Dastmalchian, & House, 2012). The primary purpose of GLOBE was to examine the relationship between societal culture and organisational behaviour.

2. Unemployment rates for Krasnoyarsk and Warsaw are from personal communications with local experts: Kureshov (e-mail on 13 October 2006) and Grazyna Kranas (e-mail on 23 August 2007). For Rochester and Utica, the unemployment rates are from the US Department of Labor (http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveryOutputServlet, 3 August 2009). We have used Onaran (2007) as a source for the Turkish data.