Putting a spotlight on the trustor in trust research

One important reason why trust and trustworthiness should not be confounded (e.g. Hardin, 2002) is that the latter focuses our attention mainly on the trustee and away from the trustor. Even when we are careful to talk about ‘perceived trustworthiness’ (e.g. Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995, p. 715, Figure 1, emphasis added) – which should convey that it is up to trustors to interpret any cues of trustworthiness – there is a tendency to see trust mainly as a result of the trustees’ given characteristics, especially the likelihood they will honour trust. Similarly, the ‘standard’ survey question used by psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists and others (see, e.g. Uslaner, 2015) to the present day asks respondents, if they think ‘most people can be trusted’. The question is thus phrased with reference to the trustee side, instead of checking the trustor side and probing, for example, if ‘most people are willing to trust’ or at least the respondents themselves are ‘mostly willing to trust’.

Somewhat paradoxically, answers to the widely used ‘standard’ question are actually supposed to tell us something about the trustors answering (their propensity to trust, see also the comments on Patent & Searle, 2019 below) rather than about the actual trustworthiness of all those potential trustees out there. Who are ‘most people’ supposed to be in the first place (see Delhey, Newton, & Welzel, 2011 on the ‘radius of trust’ problem)? Still, the trustors’ (propensity to) trust is framed primarily as a matter of trustee trustworthiness, obscuring any other factors that might influence the trustors’ trustfulness and actual trusting actions.

Trustworthiness and trustfulness go together, of course, especially if we do not merely see them as static dispositions but as dynamic accomplishments in trusting relationships. However, researchers tend to be preoccupied with trustworthiness. This has not always been so and it may well be the case that early trust research focused too much on trustors and individual traits that would explain their willingness to trust (Rotter, 1967; Wrightsman, 1966) so that later trust research went the other way and examined mainly the trustees’ incentives or inclinations to be trustworthy. Jones and Shah (2016) provide a very helpful analysis of how the ‘locus of trust’ may shift from trustor to trustee to dyadic influences, which unfortunately still refers mainly to the dimensions of perceived trustworthiness as the dependent variables instead of also devising a model of the trustor’s trustfulness. In this vein, Lu, Kong, Ferrin, and Dirks (2017) present evidence that trustor attributes, along with shared attributes but not trustee attributes, influence trust in negotiations. Hence I am glad to announce that the current issue of Journal of Trust Research (JTR) contains articles that put a spotlight on the trustor again. For sure they do a lot more than this and they all contribute various valuable insights beyond this one aspect that I have chosen to point out here, but I am confident that all authors will agree that their particular stories revolve especially around trustors, not only trustees.

Before showcasing their contributions in more detail below, there is good news on behalf of the Editorial Team. JTR is now included in the revised Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List (https://abdc.edu.au/research/abdc-journal-list/). The application for inclusion was filed and signed by our Australia-based colleagues Tyler Okimoto, Nicole Gillespie, Matthew Hornsey, Bart de Jong, Steven Lui, Bo Bernhard Nielsen, Natalia Nikolova and Michael Rosemann. Powerful endorsements were also provided by the following leading international scholars: John Child, Roy Lewicki, Oliver Schilke, Sim Sitkin, Jörg Sydow, Anne Tsui and Aks Zaheer. Their statements confirmed the journal’s quality and rigorous editorial processes and, fundamentally, the relevance of JTR as a platform for the transdisciplinary research community working on ‘trust’ as an immensely important societal issue.

In the ABDC system, JTR falls within the field of ‘Management’ and has been rated as a new journal in the third-highest category ‘B’ alongside other highly respected outlets such as Business Ethics and European Management Journal. The application required hard work from the editorial team digging out relevant statistics and other supporting material and I would like to thank especially Nicole Gillespie and Leona Henry as well as Routledge’s James Cleaver and all our signatories and endorsers for making it possible. For an even better ‘A’ rating in the future, all JTR supporters can do their part by submitting to and importantly citing recent work from the journal.

The current JTR issue underscores the value of further investigations of how trust works in various kinds of contexts. At first sight, the five articles included this time may not seem strongly connected, each having their own unique and specific contribution. However, reading them front to back, as an Editor does, some common themes emerge. To me, this time the articles are connected by putting the spotlight on trustors and not just trustees. This is very welcome because trust research overall should display a good balance between more trustee-focused and more trustor-focused accounts as well as a thorough understanding of dynamic, contextualised trustor–trustee interactions (see also Grimpe, 2019). The spotlight on trustors is also very much needed, in my opinion, because the public discourses feature so many trust crises, breaches of trust and manifestations of distrust where the problem seems to be attributed almost exclusively to the trustee side. However, it takes two to tango and whenever trust seems difficult, it may not just be because of a lack of trustworthiness on one side, but also because of a lack of trustfulness on the other side. In other words, when trying to understand how trust is built, maintained or repaired, we should not black-box those who are supposed to trust (again).

In their ‘Qualitative meta-analysis of propensity to trust measurement’, Volker Patent and Rosalind Searle (2019) clearly focus on trustors, taking the most common account of the trustors’ side – their propensity to trust – and comparing the different ways in which this construct has been understood and operationalised. Their systematic review of the literature (1966–2018) identifies 26 measures of propensity to trust, applied in 179 studies. Simply the number of different measures suggests that researchers have had various ideas of how to capture the basic idea that trustors differ in their readiness to trust regardless of specific circumstances. Patent and Searle (2019) distinguish six thematic areas and find that most scales reflect propensity to trust in terms of a positive belief in human nature, but there are also further aspects such as general trust, role expectations, institutional trust, cautiousness and other personality attributes. The authors argue for more considered selection of scales and make a case for multi-dimensionality in measures of propensity to trust in organisational research. An important point for further research highlighted by the authors and which I would very much like to reinforce concerns the degree to which the trustors’ propensity is situationally variable or a stable characteristic (see also Weinschenk & Dawes, 2019, in the previous JTR issue). For sure, trustors do more than give a fixed response to a given trust stimulus.

Sandra Schiemann, Christina Mühlberger, David Schoorman and Eva Jonas’s (2019) article ‘Trust me, I am a caring coach: The benefits of establishing trustworthiness during coaching by communicating benevolence’ might seem to be trustee-focused only, because they mainly ask which element of trustworthiness according to the ability, integrity and benevolence model (Mayer et al., 1995) coaches tend to emphasise in their work with clients. They interviewed 42 inexperienced coaches, 29 experienced coaches and 24 clients and found with inductive qualitative content analysis that coaches differed in how much they emphasised ability or benevolence. Interestingly, this depended not just on the experience of the coaches but – spotlight on the trustors – also on the clients’ autonomy need. Thus, Schiemann et al. (2019) conclude that communicating benevolence can support the client’s autonomy need. In return, this means that the specific needs of the trustor can explain how they respond to different cues of trustworthiness from trustees. A display of ability may, therefore, help build trust with some trustors much more than with others. It reminds me of the finding that tattooed people see tattoos on others more favourably than people without tattoos (Timming & Perrett, 2017) and that we are more likely to trust people who look similar to us and belong to the same group (Tsankova, Vanman, & Kappas, 2018). Trustworthiness is an attribution made by the trustor, shaped by the trustor’s own characteristics, needs and emotions (Jones, 1996).

A certain puzzle around trustors is captured extremely nicely with the birdcage metaphor, taken from interview material, in the title of Tina Øllgaard Bentzen’s (2019) article ‘The birdcage is open, but will the bird fly? How interactional and institutional trust interplay in public organisations’. Her case study in the municipality of Copenhagen, Denmark, addresses the question of whether the greater autonomy given to public sector employees in their work following New Public Management reforms is actually welcomed by employees and reciprocated by trust (see also Vallentin & Thygesen, 2017, for a complementary study). As trustors, employees may not actually perceive greater autonomy as a sign of their leaders’ trustworthiness but as a ‘poisoned chalice’ (Skinner, Dietz, & Weibel, 2014). Bentzen (2019) distinguishes between interactional and institutional trust and shows from her case material that both are needed for ‘birds’ to really fly when the cage is opened. Furthermore, she finds that other factors such as horizontal trust, professional confidence and available resources also affect employees’ willingness to accept offers of greater autonomy. Clearly, in this study, it is very much up to the trustors if they are going to play along which, in turn, depends not just on the specific trustees they interact with but also the institutional context which may or may not be conducive to trust.

The next article by Ensieh Roud and Gausdal (2019) demonstrates primarily how trust plays out and is developed at the inter-organisational level across the main phases of emergency management, set empirically in the international Arctic Sea region (Iceland, Norway and Russia in particular). Roud and Gausdal (2019) find that in each phase of emergency management, trust has a critical role to play such as improving coordination, communication, reliability and learning. They present a cross-level framework for trust development which underpins process theories of trust. The empirical part of the study is impressive not least due to the high-risk setting in which emergency services operate. This is where the interview quotes shine a light on the trustors’ role in trust development. Just two ideas for illustration: First, swift trust in the response phase is usually present but not a matter of pure routine and role execution, because each emergency is unique. Trustors exercise judgement all the time and connect a multitude of cues. Second, the stabilisation of trust at the interorganisational level and across specific emergency operations depends on whether trustors take the time to learn. As the evaluation phase is mostly accorded low priority, trustors miss the opportunity to build more resilient interorganisational trust even though, one would assume, they should be interested, also as trustees, to benefit from this trust in future operations.

Finally, Reuven Shapira (2019) shares the remarkable insights he gained over many years observing ‘jumper’ managers, i.e. executives joining from outside the organisation, and their difficulties in getting positive trust spirals instead of negative distrust spirals going in the organisations they were supposed to lead due to their inability – as trustors – to handle their own vulnerability. Thus, whilst they also tended to give their followers many reasons to doubt their trustworthiness, for example, in terms of ability, it seems to me that they mainly failed as trustors towards their followers rather than as trustees. This is confirmed by the cases of successful ‘jumper’ managers who handled their own knowledge gaps and psychological insecurity much more constructively. In Shapira’s (2019) account, contextual factors helped explain why managers chose to practice or avoid vulnerable involvement. Overall, the study looks at would-be trustees who fail or succeed in gaining trust due to how they behave as trustors themselves (see also Kasten, 2018).

In the current JTR issue, Bentzen’s (2019) and Shapira’s (2019) studies, but in many ways also Schiemann et al. (2019) and Roud and Gausdal (2019) show that the distinction between trustor and trustee is mainly an analytical one. In many settings, we have to assume the reciprocal interplay between trustor and trustee and the fact that all sides become trustor and trustee to each other in a relationship. Notably, I would argue this should not be imagined as simple continuous role switching but as dynamic role elaboration where actions ‘as trustor’ shape actions ‘as trustee’ and vice versa. If this makes sense, then our two spotlights, one for the trustor and one for the trustee, will have to switch between the actors so often that we might as well have two for each actor, illuminating them from both sides simultaneously.

I hope that readers will enjoy each of the articles on their own merits, as well as gain a deeper sense of why it is important that we develop an advanced understanding of trustors. The articles have benefited from careful feedback and guidance by the Associate Editors who handled them, and hence, I would like to thank Kirsimarja Blomqvist, Don Ferrin, Frédérique Six and Michele Williams as well as all the anonymous reviewers who were involved in this issue. I am also grateful to JTR Deputy Editor-in-Chief Nicole Gillespie for valuable comments on this Editorial.

Furthermore, a very big thank you goes to JTR Managing Editor Leona Henry who submitted her PhD thesis on ‘Organizing in Interstitial Networks: Practicing Trust, Paradox and Boundary Work’ at my university at the end of August and moved on to become Assistant Professor at Tilburg University. Leona Henry has done a fantastic job supporting the journal for two years, and we wish her all the best in her new job. The new JTR Managing Editor is Tina Azad, also working with me at Witten/Herdecke University. Her research focuses on the role of third parties in trust development, and we can all look forward to working with Tina Azad in the publication process and in promoting JTR within our community and beyond.

Finally, quick news from our friends at the First International Network on Trust (FINT): the next ‘Workshop on Trust Within and Between Organizations’ will take place in March 2021, organised by Audrey Korsgaard at the University of South Carolina. Moreover, Kirsimarja Blomqvist is a new member of the FINT Board, Stacey Conchie is the new FINT Communications Officer and, last but not least, Lisa van der Werff will be taking over from Antoinette Weibel as FINT President in January 2020.