关键词: 信任, 组织, 关系模式, 信任者, 机制

Abstract:

Trust has attracted great attention from researchers in the organizational field. What resulted in or nurtured trust is one of the important issues in this field. Previous researchers focused on the tendency of trustors and the trustworthiness of trustees, and proposed that the general opinions on others and the traits of trustees, i.e., ability, benevolence and integrity, influenced the levels of interpersonal trust. Nowadays researchers paid more attention to contextual factors, the proactivity of trustors and affective or emotional factors, and made significant advantages on swift trust. The positive effects of trust on interpersonal interactions, teams, organizations and the society have obtained agreements among researchers, but when and how trust made these effects is still not really clear. Recent relevant research tries to answer the question from the following perspectives: the mechanical analysis of the relationships between trust and antecedents and that of the relationships between trust and outcomes. Current research on the development of trust has focused on the constructions of theoretical models, and has changed from the rational choice model to the motivated attribution of model (MAM). MAM stresses the attritional processes in the formation of trust and may be an important direction for the research on trust development. The measurement of trust is the basis of empirical research in this field. Researchers developed various questionnaires for trust, but none got widely used. Borrowing form Game theory and its empirical paradigm, some researchers used trust game to manipulate trust and trustworthiness. Moreover, some researchers apply social network analysis in trust research and analyze the reciprocal relationships in the given network. This method considers the effect of relational network on trust, which not only manipulates the trust more accurately, but also sets technical bases for further understanding the effects and mechanisms of trust. Following the above directions, future research should understand the image of trust in relational model, address the macro–level contextual factors as antecedents of trust, test models of trust development and establish the integrated models for the mechanism of trust.

Key words: trust, organization, relational model, trustors, mechanism