Organizational trust and work attitudes among Chinese prison officers

Abstract

Organizational trust is an important workplace factor for organizations and their employees. There are different types of organizational trust, with coworker, supervisor and management trust being major ones. Yet, limited research has examined how organizational trust is associated with the work attitudes of correctional officers, such as job involvement, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The current study explored how coworker, supervisor and management trust were related to the job involvement, job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment of Chinese correctional officers at two prisons in southeast China. Management trust had significant positive associations with involvement, satisfaction and commitment. The current results indicate the need to enhance management trust among the studied Chinese correctional officers to raise the three work attitudes.

Keywords:

• coworker trust
• job involvement
• job satisfaction
• management trust
• organizational commitment
• organizational trust
• supervisor trust

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Eric G. Lambert has declared no conflicts of interest

Jianhong Liu has declared no conflicts of interest

Monica Solinas-Saunders has declared no conflicts of interest

Jennifer Wareham has declared no conflicts of interest

Shanhe Jiang has declared no conflicts of interest

Jinwu Zhang has declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

Studies were carried out with human participants (including in vivo or active human participants and inactive human participants through file records, archival information or other documentation relating to humans).

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (Research Ethics Committee of Macau Society of Criminology) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

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

Notes

1 This possible explanation was raised by a reviewer. We thank the reviewer for this point.