Restoring Trust after an Insider Breach: Both the Genders Matter—CEOs and Users

ABSTRACT

There is limited research providing guidelines to CEOs, particularly female CEOs, about the efficacy of different responses (i.e. apology and denial) in the aftermath of an insider privacy breach incident. The study synthesizes a multitude of theories under three categories male-gender bias, same-gender bias and opposite-gender bias and uses them along with organizational justice theory to investigate the moderating role of the interaction between CEO gender and the user gender on trust restoration process after an insider breach incident. Trust restoration process is compared across different trust beliefs—ability, benevolence, and integrity. The findings show that the CEO-user gender interaction significantly shapes the trust restoration process. The findings also show that the forces that shape the initial trust work differently for trust restoration and are shaped by the underlying CEO gender—user gender combination. The research has several theoretical, managerial and social implications, and enlists several future research ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust violation
• Trust restoration
• CEO gender
• Insider breach
• stereotype
• system justification theory
• social dominance theory
• apology
• denial

Acknowledgments

The research was made possible in part due to Frederick E. Baer Professorship in Business at Austin E. Cofrin School of Business at University of Wisconsin - Green Bay.