The Impact Of Economic And Social Orientation On Trust Within Teams

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a model to examine the impact of an individual’s economic and social orientation and the congruence of such orientations across the trustor-trusted dyad on the level of dyadic trust within a team.  The model explicitly accounts for higher order dependencies in trust among team members and the potential reciprocity in trust between members of a dyad.  The results from our model estimation provide evidence that congruence in economic and social orientation is an important antecedent of dyadic trust.  We also find that dyadic trust is characterized by higher order dependencies among team members; however, we do not find that trust is characterized by reciprocity.  We also find a wide variation in the polarization in teams based on the levels of trust among their members.  Taken together, these findings highlight the need to account for higher order dependencies in the study of trust in teams.