Leader trusting behaviours: a mixed-method approach on follower’s perceptions and reactions

ABSTRACT

Trust is an important precondition of effective collaboration between leaders and followers. However, which behaviours do followers perceive as indicators that their leader trusts them, and how do they react thereupon? Across three studies, we developed a taxonomy of perceived leader trusting behaviours and identified followers’ reactions. In Study 1, we conducted interviews with 29 employees from different organizations. Systematic content analysis revealed four categories of perceived leader trusting behaviour: reliance (e.g., delegation), disclosure (e.g., sharing personal information), acknowledgement (e.g., appreciation), and guardianship (e.g., tolerating mistakes). Moreover, followers reported mostly positive (e.g., pride, higher performance) but also some negative reactions (e.g., strain). This initial taxonomy was validated in two consecutive studies. In Study 2, we used qualitative data from 224 employees. All behaviours reported in Study 2 could be captured by the taxonomy from Study 1. In Study 3, we used quantitative data from a two-wave survey with 415 employees. Results supported the taxonomy’s discriminant validity and its predictive and incremental validity with respect to follower reactions, such as performance and trust in the leader. Together, this research contributes to the literature by introducing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of leader trusting behaviours as perceived by followers.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• trusting behaviour
• follower reactions
• mixed-method approach

Acknowledgements

We thank Antonia Hucht, Antonia Petry, Florian Hesselmann, Hanna Lüdemann, Laura Krieglstein, Miriam Pritz, and Sebastian Brammerloh for their invaluable contribution in transcribing, coding, analysing, and anonymizing the data from Studies 1 and 2. Additionally, we thank Associate Editor Roni Reiter-Palmon and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data underlying this paper are available under this https://osf.io/6kxeq/?view_only=aa3e87f44a4b4ffeb00afa5e60b542e8

Compliance with ethical standards

Research involving human participants All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. All three studies reported in this paper were approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology and Sports Science at the University of Münster; the first study under the ID 2021–02-ChN, the second study under the ID 2021–63-AR, and the third study under the ID 2022–63-AR-FA.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2023.2250087

Notes

1. We preregistered Explorative Research Questions that we do not report formally in the manuscript. However, parts of our analysis test certain aspects of them.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation under Grant NO 1276/1-1.