| Determinants of Interpersonal Trust in New Work Relationships |
| | Ammeter, Anthony Paul | U. of Texas, Austin | tammeter@mail.utexas.edu | (512) 471-3676 |
| | With the advent of new forms of organizing such as project-based teams and new types of employment arrangements involving
temporary or contract workers, work environments involving relationships between familiar coworkers are rapidly disappearing.
Research indicates that interpersonal trust plays an important role in the development of cooperative work relationships. Traditional
views of interpersonal trust, however, suggest that trust is something that is built over time and through interaction among individuals.
What is it then, in the absence of time and interaction, that determines the level of interpersonal trust among coworkers at the
beginning of their work relationships?
To investigate this, MBA students evaluated their "coworkers" in class project teams just after having met with each other for the first
time. A comprehensive measure of trust was used that included an affect-based, a cognition-based, and a behavioral component.
Predictors of the levels of trust were characteristics of the respondent (propensity to trust and orientation towards organizational
citizenship behaviors) and demographic similarity of the respondent and the coworker (gender, race, and length of work experience).
Results indicated that an individual's orientation towards organizational citizenship behaviors was highly predictive of affect-based
trust, cognition-based trust, and intention to engage in trusting behaviors. Propensity to trust predicted only intention to engage in
trusting behavior. Racial similarity was the only significant demographic indicator: racially similar dyads reported higher levels of
affect-based trust and cognition-based trust than racially different dyads.
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| | Keywords: Trust; New work relationships; Demography |
| Trust for Management and Performance: Who Minds the Shop While the Employees Watch the Boss? |
| | Mayer, Roger C. | Baylor U. | Roger_Mayer@Baylor.edu | (254)-710-6203 |
| | Gavin, Mark B. | Oklahoma State U. | mgavin@okway.okstate.edu | (405)-744-8614 |
| | It has been suggested for decades that trust increases performance, but evidence of this has been sparse. This study investigates the relationship between an employee's trust for two different management referents, the plant manager and the top management team, and the employee's performance, including both in-role performance and OCBs. Furthermore, focus is offered as a mediating mechanism for this relationship. Results support a fully mediated model in which trust for both management referents was positively related to focus, which, in turn, was positively related to performance. |
| | Keywords: trust; focus ; performance |
| Turn the other cheek or an eye for an eye: Targets' responses to incivility |
| | Porath, Christine L. | U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | christine_porath@unc.edu | 919-962-3114 |
| | Pearson, Christine M. | U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | chris_pearson@unc.edu | 919-962-3117 |
| | Shapiro, Debra L. | U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | shapirod@unc.edu | (919)-962-3224 |
| | Incivility, or low intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, has increasingly been cited as a problem in the workplace. Despite its prevalence, the consequences of such behavior are unknown. The question of interest in this study is, do targets of incivility turn the other cheek, or revert to 'eye for an eye' behavior, by committing acts of deviance on the instigator, the organization, or both? We examine this question using the four types of workplace deviance described by Robinson and Bennett (1995). Guided by their typology, we assess whether acts of incivility provoke targets to respond with deviance, and if so, whether targets revolt against the instigator, or the organization, and whether the form of deviance is relatively minor or more severe.
Using data from 775 respondents, our findings suggest that acts of incivility provoke individuals to react with deviance and spare neither the instigator nor the organization. However, while previous research refers to unpleasant behavior as monolithic, our factor analysis of incivility suggests that there are two types of incivility - active and passive. In addition, our findings indicate that whether an instigator's uncivil act is active versus passive affects the type of deviant behavior observed. This study discusses the implications for both organizations and instigators that do not pay heed to uncivil acts. |
| | Keywords: Incivility; Deviance |
| Why Do People Lie and How Does it Affect Them?: The Effect of Having an Ethical Climate and a Severe Consequence to the Victim of a Lie |
| | Aquino, Karl F. | Georgia State U. | mgtkfa@langate.gsu.edu | 404-651-3400 |
| | Grover, Steven L. | Georgia State U. | sgrover@gsu.edu | 404-651-3117 |
| | This study investigates lying in the context of a distributive negotiation. We examine two conditions that may affect whether a person lies to the other party in a negotiation. These two variables are 1) the ethical climate of the organization and 2) the consequences of the lie to the other party in the negotiation. We hypothesize that each influences the occurrence of lying and we found support for the Consequence variable but not the Climate variable. That is, people were less likely to lie when doing so had a strong negative consequence for the other party.
Many participants in this study lied about the length of a contract (about 39%) and the second part of the study investigates how people deal with their own act of lying. We hypothesize that people need to rationalize their lies, and find that they do so by denying that they lied. Paradoxically, we found that people who lied reported themselves as more honest than people who did not, and that this finding was most true when there was a strong ethical climate against telling lies. |
| | Keywords: Honesty; culture; ethics |
| Predicting Observers' Dispositional Attributions for Workplace Violence |
| | Wilkerson, James M. | Georgia Institute of Technology | jw154@prism.gatech.edu | (404)-894-3943 |
| | Employees (N = 292) completed time-ordered cross-sectional questionnaires, to include reacting
to a workplace violence vignette, in this study of predictors of observers' dispositional attributions
for workplace violence. Observers' job level, age, external locus of control, and assessment of
organizational changes' impact on actual workplace violence all predicted dispositional attributions. |
| | Keywords: aggression,; workplace violence,; blaming |